The Green[e]house Effect: a Weblog

When Reservists Have Reservations

Reservists sent hither and yon by the Bush administration have apparently gotten tired of the strain — tired enough that the Army reports a drop of about seven percent in reserve reenlistments.

This marks only the second shortfall since 1997, according to the Pentagon. Given the perks Army officials have started throwing at troops in order to keep them in the fold, though [this article mentions plaques, NASCAR gift certificates, and $5,000 bonuses], that one-time shortfall could be a harbinger of more trouble ahead.

Pardon me for speculating, but I doubt this was the mission that the Bush administration wanted to accomplish. Still, given the way the president and others pushed off our allies and insisted on charging into the desert alone, a day of reckoning had to come at some point. That’s the thing about a volunteer army; if you use the troops as cannon fodder, pretty soon they stop volunteering for duty in the cannon.

The Week That Was

I want to thank my buddy Tim Jarrett for his guest stint over in the sidebar — and in fact, I would, except that the little showoff’s blog poetry demonstration the other day put me to shame so badly that I might as well hang this blogging thing up. I mean, come on — I just am not worthy.

Kidding, of course. I know that he’s really only getting back at me, after all these years, for almost forgetting my tux at his wedding. [Besides which, I don’t want to have to get a new hobby — my other faves, like mountain biking and zymurgy, look a lot more expensive.]

At any rate, give a big, warm round of applause to Mr. Jarrett, and if you want more genius where that came from, follow him to Jarrett House North. For my part, he’s welcome to come back whenever he wants.

Pow! Bap! Smash!

If you haven’t peeked at the conservative corner of the blog world today, you need to check out the fight that broke out over a letter that Baghdad blogger Salam Pax published this week in the Guardian, in advance of the president’s trip to the United Kingdom.*

Pax snarked about Bush’s seeming inability to come to grips with the unraveling security situation in Iraq, which led the normally mild-mannered James Lileks to take him to task for acting like an ingrate towards American soldiers who “[did] what you never had the stones to do: pick up a rifle and face the Ba’athists.” But all that serves as mere preamble to the response delivered by Daniel Drezner — a fellow conservative — who had this to say:

Hey, James? F%$@ you.

And that’s just the first two sentences. It gets better from there. Read the whole thing.

Tripped Out

I got to hear Joe Trippi — the campaign manager for Howard Dean — this morning, at a function hosted at the offices of Madame Brushstroke. I’ll write more about my impression of the day later, but I had a great time, and managed to ask him about the new GOP campaign ad I blogged about a moment ago.

He said … well, pretty much what he said here:

[T]he war with Iraq had nothing to do with the terrorists who attacked the United States on 9/11. We can’t let them get away with this.

The ad urges viewers to tell Congress “to support the president’s policy of pre-emptive self defense.” But the Bush Doctrine of pre-emptive war is wrong for America. It is costing us in blood and money, and in our nation’s standing around the world.

But the facts have never gotten in the way of the Bush administration’s agenda — and the facts aren’t going to get in the way of their reelection strategy. This ad is about distorting Howard Dean’s opposition to the war with Iraq. They say that those who opposed the war oppose defending our nation from terrorism. But the war in Iraq had nothing to do with al Qaeda or the war on terrorism. The president’s misleading statements — and the war they led us into — are making us less safe.

Good answer. If you want, you can help the campaign go on the air with it.

So, How ’Bout Them Bush Haters?

Because clearly, it’s irrational — not to mention just plain rude — to hate a man for saying you love terrorists:

After months of sustained attacks against President Bush in Democratic primary debates and commercials, the Republican Party is responding this week with its first advertisement of the presidential race, portraying Mr. Bush as fighting terrorism while his potential challengers try to undermine him with their sniping.

The new commercial gives the first hint of the themes Mr. Bush’s campaign is likely to press in its early days. It shows Mr. Bush, during the last State of the Union address, warning of continued threats to the nation: “Our war against terror is a contest of will, in which perseverance is power,” he says after the screen flashes the words, “Some are now attacking the president for attacking the terrorists.”

Well, now.

I’m sure glad to be disabused of the notion that people might be fighting Bush because, you know, he’s so busy hunting Moby Dick Saddam Hussein and his mythical mushroom clouds that he’s all but quit attacking the terrorists. I wouldn’t want someone going under the false impression that most people who oppose Bush love their country, and think the president has done a piss poor job of protecting it.

Such a loving correction. Such a lovable man. Don’t you feel the love?

Motor Trend Catches the Hybrid Trend

Marking the latest chapter in America’s continuing love affair with the hybrid gas/electric automobile … well, we don’t have a love affair with hybrids yet, but this decision by Motor Trend to give the 2004 Toyota Prius its imprimatur as the car of the year might be an infatuation’s first stirrings.

Given the sheer level of innovation built into that car — which makes its 60 miles-per-gallon city mileage almost a mere bonus — the editors would have a hard time making the case for any other choice. This doesn’t guarantee Toyota gangbuster sales; in fact, it looks like the company might have a tough time meeting demand. Still, compared with Toyota, American automakers — especially General Motors, which just postponed production of hybrid models until 2007 — look flatfooted.

Rip This Flypaper

Some proponents of the invasion of Iraq have tried to justify the war by touting the so-called ‘flypaper strategy’ — the notion that putting American troops in the Middle East would draw terrorists away from targets in the United States. As Andrew Sullivan explained it:

Being based in Iraq helps us not only because of actual bases; but because the American presence there diverts terrorist attention away from elsewhere. By confronting them directly in Iraq, we get to engage them in a military setting that plays to our strengths rather than to theirs’. Continued conflict in Iraq, in other words, needn’t always be bad news. It may be a sign that we are drawing the terrorists out of the woodwork and tackling them in the open.

Leave aside for a moment the question of whether that tactic paid off. [The latest bombings of soft targets in Riyadh and Istanbul raise a question or two … but I digress.] Ask yourself: do the calculations of the flypaper theory’s supporters leave anyone important out of the equation?

Whether or not you favor using Iraq as a magnet to attract terrorists, the notion probably rates as something less than a poll-tested favorite with Iraqis. Residents of the country likely don’t mind the the concept of improved security for Americans, at least in the abstract. It’s just that no one asked them whether they wanted their country converted into a shooting gallery to make the flypaper strategy work.

With Iraqi civilians losing their lives on a daily basis — 12 died just this morning — the question of whether Iraqis volunteered to be our flypaper looms ever larger. Except that there is no question, really — no one can seriously contend that the people of Iraq had any sort of plebiscite, or even an opportunity to assent to having their country used as a battleground between Americans and terrorists.

That’s what the flypaper strategy comes down to: getting American civilians out of the line of fire by putting Iraqi civilians there instead. If someone can tell me how that amounts to a moral defense of this war, I’m all ears.

When Traffic Beats the Alternative

After my rant last week about traffic, a couple of fellow sufferers on the highways commented about one particularly nasty flaw built into the Atlanta road network: a choke point where three freeways that carry a total of 14 lanes in each direction narrow down to a six-lane interstate in the space of two miles. To quote Michael Demmons — the Discount Blogger, and a Grant Park resident — “[w]hoever decided to empty 75, 85, and 400 into a ‘Connector’ should be drawn and quartered!!!”

Not to give a local history lesson, but the people who gave us that slice of brilliance did get drawn and quartered. Thing is, they got punished because of the fix they came up with.

When you look at a map of Atlanta, the spokes-on-a-wheel arrangement of highways stands out — but if you look closely, you can see hints of roads that the state might have built, if only local residents hadn’t gotten in the way. Look at Georgia 400, for instance. Then look at Interstate 675. Draw a line to connect them.

Notice how seamless the line looks? That’s no accident. You just drew Interstate 485, a highway designed to carry drivers through Virginia-Highland, Morningside, Inman Park, Reynoldstown, East Atlanta and a slew of other neighborhoods — hello, Grant Park! — and to give through traffic a way to bypass the Connector.

On the east-to-west axis, note how the Stone Mountain Freeway (U.S. 78), if you draw a line continuing to downtown, takes you right to the terminus of Freedom Parkway. Coincdence? No — that would have been I-475, a freeway through Decatur, Candler Park, Avondale, and Druid Hills, built to connect the eastern suburbs to downtown. To the south, state maps reserved a space for Interstate 420 — a link to carry traffic from the Lakewood Freeway, north of the airport, to Interstate 20 [by way of the parts of East Atlanta left unpaved] in the vicinity of Gresham Road.

Would it have been easier to drive here if those roads had been built? Yes. But would you want to live here, knowing that all of the neighborhoods I mentioned — considered gentrifying or prime real estate today — had been paved over?

People need ways to move around cities. No question about that. But Atlanta residents — myself included — have to avoid falling into the trap of framing solutions around automobiles, even though that’s an easy mistake to make when people spend so much time viewing the city over a dashboard. Freeways here fall a little short of perfection, but we still have plenty of pavement. We come nowhere near having plenty of alternatives to pavement — think of rail options, sidewalks, and bike trails — or even having enough of them.

Cities don’t exist to haul traffic. Traffic exists because of cities. Let’s try to remember that.

A Deficit of Courage

Kevin Drum writes that freshly inaugurated Governor Schwarzenegger of California wants to patch the state’s budget hole, surprisingly enough, by borrowing money. After actually worsening matters by eliminating a car registration tax hike by executive fiat, Schwarzenegger announced that he would float a $15 billion bond issue to carry the state through the next year.

In a state with bond ratings nearing junk status, that move all but guarantees a heavy financial burden on California taxpayers in twenty or thirty years. It grabs money that they might otherwise fund investments in solving pressing issues of that time, or in building towards the state’s future, for the sake of giving Schwarzenegger an easy out that spares him the political cost of raising taxes.

That fits a pattern; modern Republican officials love to spend money, it seems, more than they like going to taxpayers to raise it. From Virginia to Texas to the White House, GOP leaders have specialized in slashing taxes while leaving spending on popular programs untouched. That lets the party reap the gratitude of taxpayers who find extra money in their pockets — but it leaves future holders of public office, and future taxpayers, to pay the tab.

It’s a clever game: buying the favor of potential voters by sending the tab to people — whether not born yet, or not in the state or country yet — who have no opportunity to cast their votes against you. However canny you might consider the politics of it, though, you have to see that it doesn’t take much courage.

Bob, We Hardly Knew Ye

Last fall, after the Georgia legislature redistricted local congressman Bob Barr into a primary fight with a fellow Republican, John Linder, I told someone that I hoped Barr would come out on top. For all his loudmouthed partisanship, Barr had some redeeming qualities [his defense of civil liberties, for one], while Linder — in spite of his genteel manner — was actually more dangerous, because his politeness led people to mistake him for a moderate.

Barr lost — and alas, he has a column in last week’s Creative Loafing that illustrates just what I meant. Using a Post Office proposal to add personal tracking codes to the mail as a starting point, Barr comes out swinging against the Patriot Act and the knee-jerk authoritarians in his party, though he never mentions the Republicans by name.

Whatever you say about Barr, he was an honest civil libertarian. I respected him for that. Linder? He’s in Congress plugging for a national sales tax to replace the current tax code — a recipe for shifting the tax burden en bloc to working families and middle-class Americans if ever there were one. Call that what you want, but it certainly isn’t moderate.

Barr is making a decent impact by moonlighting for the American Civil Liberties Union, but we need Republicans like him in power, rather than on the outside speaking truth to it. Any chance we can find a district for him to run in?

Fear of Music

Matthew Yglesias started a monster comment thread over at his site with a post complaining about Rolling Stone’s attempt to rank the best albums of all time. Matt seems to think Rolling Stone went with too many entries from the Beatles. I disagree — overestimating the influence of the Beatles is pretty tough — but there’s room to argue.

I never get into the business of ranking top albums; people have too many criteria to rate by, and as a result their lists end up reflecting their personal biases. Just for sport, though, I racked my brain for the most influential I could think of from the last two decades or so. This is what I wound up with, in no particular order:

• De La Soul, Three Feet High and Rising
• N.W.A., Straight Outta Compton
• Dr. Dre, The Chronic
• R.E.M., Murmur
• Nirvana, Nevermind
• Pearl Jam, Ten
• The Pixies, Doolittle
• Guns ‘n Roses, Appetite for Destruction
• The Stone Roses, The Stone Roses
• Red Hot Chili Peppers, Blood Sugar Sex Magik
• The Smiths, The Queen Is Dead
• Radiohead, The Bends
• Blur, Parklife
• Uncle Tupelo, No Depression
• The Replacements, Tim
• U2, War

I can’t believe I don’t have any Prince up there, but I can’t think of an album to pick. [Thanks, Purple Rain, but no thanks.]

That leaves out a lot of great efforts that were sui generis — Automatic for the People, Paul’s Boutique, OK Computer — but I said ‘most influential,’ not best. Such is life.

A Program Note

A while back, my friend Tim Jarrett tossed some flattery my way by calling my sidebar link bin “blog poetry.” I’ve decided to return the favor — so for the next few days I’ve given him the run of the sidebar, where he’ll be making guest posts.

What does that mean for you? Double the random interweb pleasure, and double the fun. As for Tim … well, I think he’ll figure out soon enough that this “blog poetry” isn’t as easy as it looks. =)

At any rate, give Tim a warm welcome — and make sure to visit his main site, which is chock full o’ goodness.

iTunes Bait and Switch?

A development at Apple’s iTunes Music Store lately has me scratching my head. The site made a hullabaloo at its debut about selling every album for $9.99, but if you look around — at my latest current listening link, for example, or at the newest releases from Travis and Blur — you can find records that not only retail well above that price, but that even sell for more than you can buy the same music on CD at Amazon.com.

To my eyes, that totally defeats the purpose of the iTunes business model. Creating a market in downloads ought to be a win-win for consumers — who can use it to access legal music online — and for the record companies who can use it to recover business from the peer-to-peer file sharing services. The distribution model for companies at the store — basically nothing more than encoding records as AAC files, and uploading them to Apple servers — allows labels to cut expenses for promotional materials, transportation, packaging, and manufacturing. Yet some labels, for whatever reason, want customers to pay for the privilege of saving them money.

If I had to speculate, I would suppose that record companies might have forced Apple to bend its pricing rules a bit when it took the music store to Windows. As a pricing strategy, however, that makes no sense, unless labels view digital downloads as competing with the sale of actual CDs at record stores. Forcing people to fork out more to download a record than to buy a physical copy might drive some customers into Best Buy — but it also pushes potential customers into the arms Kazaa, Limewire, and other services where they can have the tracks they want for free.

Whatever the purpose, I can assure the labels that premium prices will drive off one customer: me. What point is there in paying full price for the privilege of listening to music compressed to 128 kilobits per second, when you can buy a full-quality recording for the same money? Search me.

This and That

Some random notes that I can’t fit neatly anywhere else:

• Atlanta-based readers — especially intown Bobo types who like their sprouts organic — should spend a few minutes at the Whole Foods on Ponce de Leon to ogle the fleet of new Toyota Priuses parked out front, conveniently placed there by our friends at Toyota. You actually have to wait for a test drive — but sign up anyway, if you think it’s worth it [I did], and get your shopping done in time to take your turn.

• Moving on to a sorrier aspect of city life: this town needs an angioplasty.

  The sheer magnitude of population growth — 1.3 million in the last ten years or so, nearly enough to populate Manhattan — has so far outstripped the pace of improvements to the transportation network that rush hour this afternoon reminded me of some of my worst attempts to navigate Chicago. I spent 75 minutes trying to get from Midtown out to my place in Stone Mountain — a distance of 17 miles, which usually only takes me thirty minutes to cover.

  The interstate — which was traffic free when the state expanded it from six lanes to 10 a decade ago — has gone from backing up just outside the Perimeter, which was routine last year, to backing up four miles inside. That was enough to make me bail out for the surface streets, but every one of those was just as clotted.

  Not to kvetch, but this is ridiculous. At least commuting on trains lets you read a paper or tune the world out for a bit, not to mention the nice walk it makes you work into the beginning and end of the work day. Atlanta hardly has subways, though, and they don’t go to most of the neighborhoods where transit makes sense. [Don’t even mention commuter rail; Georgia doesn’t have any.]

  This state has to get serious about giving people transportation options other than four wheels and a tank of gas, or people are going to start giving up and moving to places where commuting is a little more sane. I’m not asking for more roads; I just want more ways to get around.

• Speaking of Stone Mountain, I noticed on the way home today — at one of the many times when I was stuck idling in traffic — that the park has already flipped on its mountaintop light display for the holidays. And it’s not even Thanksgiving.

  Do you ever get the sense that at some point, all this jumping the gun will push Christmas commemorations so early that we’ll wind up using up the whole year and wrapping back around into December?

Here Comes the Sun

In news from the sceptered isle, the newspaper that gave us Page 3 is about to show a little Bush:

After coming to office with a vow to restore dignity to the White House, the president yesterday took a brief sabbatical from that effort: He granted an exclusive interview to a British tabloid that features daily photographs of nude women and articles akin to those found in our own National Enquirer.

Press secretary Scott McClellan broke the news yesterday with nonchalance. “Good morning,” he told reporters. “The president had his usual briefings this morning and just recently completed an interview with the Sun, for a discussion of his upcoming visit to the United Kingdom.”

A British journalist for a more highbrow outlet was not about to let that slip by unnoticed. “Just to clarify,” he asked, “why has the president chosen to do an interview with the Sun? It’s a newspaper which publishes daily pictures of topless women.”

Such comments are grossly unfair to the Sun. True, its Page 3 is devoted daily to photographs of women and their breasts. True, it this week named “classy Krystle, the beautiful brunette babe” as this year’s “Page 3 Idol” and amply displayed evidence of what it called her “vital statistics of 32C-24-33.”

But the Sun is so much more than breasts. It is also reporting this week on a woman who is “made of two women” and “is NOT the biological mother of two of the children she conceived and had naturally.” Other news items highlighted on the Sun’s Web site: “Man begins 12-day sausage, bean and chip bath to promote Brit food,” “German saboteurs plotted to bomb Palace with peas in WW2, files reveal,” and “Sobbing islanders say sorry to the ancestor of minister eaten by natives.”

Bush, meanwhile, has given no solo interviews this year to the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Time or Newsweek. And he hasn’t given an exclusive interview in his entire presidency to the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, Boston Globe and dozens of other major publications.

This works out just fine for all involved, though, when you think about it. Unlike people who read the Post, Times and Journal, the Sun readership fully expects boobs.

Close to the Line

Mark Byron thinks out loud about … well, you read it. It involves a “liberation front,” government buildings, judges, Democrats, and guns — lots of guns.

Illegal? Worthy of a house call by the FBI? No; it doesn’t rise to the level of incitement of imminent lawless action,* thanks to some hedging that does little to make up for the ridiculousness of his comments. But reprehensible? You can be the judge — in my eyes, it’s an easy call.

But we really must do something about those troublesome Bush haters, mustn’t we?

Woohoo!

At some point today, according to SiteMeter, the Green[e]house Effect should receive its 50,000th distinct visitor.

Hope you’ve enjoyed the fireworks over the months — they’ve certainly been fun for me. Deepest thanks for your continued patronage.

The GOP Misdirection Strategy

Back in law school during a trial advocacy class, Judge Norman Moon taught us an adage: When you have the law on the side, pound the law. When you have the facts on your side, pound the facts. When you have neither, pound the table.

It looks as though the GOP has settled on its strategy for next year’s election. The party plans to pound the table.

In an October memo, Republican National Committee chairman Ed Gillespie encouraged his troops to condemn Democratic critiques of Bush administration policies as “political hate speech.” People can contest Bush’s talents as a policymaker without hating Bush the man; it’s specious to say otherwise. But this is hardly the first time Republicans have disrupted a legitimate argument with rhetorical misdirection over recent months.

Witness the feud over whether Bush officials ever called Iraq an ‘imminent threat,’ or over whether anyone gave assurances that reconstruction in Iraq would be ‘easy.’ To the Bush supporters playing gotcha games, finding statements that support the gist or meaning of an accusation does nothing to vindicate the basic point. Instead, one has to locate the exact words — arranged in exact order, and coming emphatically from the president’s mouth — or face a chorus of hisses and calls to drop one’s arguments as wholly without merit. And as people put more and more time into squelching the hairsplitters by looking for the words to satisfy them, the argument wanders farther and farther from the basic questions:

1. Whether the Bush administration distorted intelligence, and crafted intellectually unsound and deceptive arguments, in an effort to drag the American people into war on shoddy pretenses;
2. Whether people are pointlessly getting killed as a result; and
3. Whether the administration has any semblance of a plan to bring the mission in Iraq to a successful conclusion.

Democrats will have to come up with a way to knock down the ‘political hate speech’ charge, whether they want to or not. But it’s telling that Republicans want to argue over Democrats’ mastery of Emily Post etiquette and Roget’s Thesaurus, rather than having an argument on the merits.

Making Pinocchio Look Like a Piker

Kevin Drum is making sense.

When the White House launched its PR offensive to counteract press reports from Iraq, it almost certainly had to know about this intelligence report detailing how support for American rule was falling, and the number of insurgents fighting in Iraq was growing. So why did it bother launching a spin campaign when the actual facts, sooner or later, were almost certain to blow up in the spinmeisters’ faces?

Let me guess: it was the CIA leading those poor, naïve presidential advisors in the White House — like Condoleezza Rice and Dick Cheney — down the primrose path again, right? Drum calls B.S. on that:

[T]rying to blame this kind of stuff on the CIA is getting less and less credible with every passing day: after all, if it really is the CIA’s fault, their incompetence has now endangered the interests of the United States and badly embarrassed the president so many times that it’s simply beyond belief that there haven’t been wholesale firings in Langley.

And that leaves only one conclusion, which even administration supporters need to face up to: the president and his staff are willfully and consistently ignoring facts that are inconvenient to them, and endangering the security of the United States by doing so. These guys have got to go.

People could go blue in the face from all the times that’s been said — but it has the virtue of being the truth.

… Bravely Ran Away?

This bears watching:

The Bush administration, moving up its timetable for self-government in Iraq and yielding to its own handpicked leadership there, has decided to try to hold elections in the first half of next year and turn civilian authority over to a temporary government before a new constitution is written, administration officials said Wednesday.

Increasing attacks on American and other foreign forces forced a rethinking of the administration’s approach in recent days, the officials said, lending more urgency to the need for Iraqi self-rule by the middle of next year.

The new plan — a two-step process — was intended in part, they said, to change the political climate in Iraq and reduce the anger toward occupying forces that fosters support for violence, including attacks on American and other foreign forces, by demonstrating to Iraqis that the United States is moving more quickly to establish self-rule.

But it was not clear whether those behind the guerrilla attacks, whoever they are, would regard a changed political situation as significant if large numbers of American forces are still in Iraq.

This normally would warrant only a raised eyebrow, but the obvious haste in which Iraq administrator Paul Bremer traveled to the White House this week makes it clear that something is afoot. Giving credence to that interpretation, the normally leak-averse White House operation has leaked like a sieve about Bremer’s come-to-Jesus session with the president:

For months, President Bush has insisted he was satisfied with the pace of progress in Iraq. No more. In three private, top-level meetings at the White House on Wednesday morning, Bush made his impatience and frustration clear, telling chief Iraq administrator Paul Bremer he had to find a way to make the transition to Iraqi rule work faster and better.

Bremer said the Iraqi Governing Council (IGC) was not failing in its work to prepare the transition to civilian rule, but that ” they face a very difficult time.”

Bush and Bremer met first in a National Security Council meeting that included Vice President Cheney, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and Secretary of State Colin Powell. Next, in a meeting with Rice, Bremer and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz filling in for Rumsfeld, Bush was direct, making it clear he expected results.

Finally, Bush and Bremer met privately in the Oval Office. Mindful of rumors Bremer’s job was at risk, Bush told him he was doing good work in a difficult position.

Then Bremer was dispatched to the White House lawn to explain to reporters that he would head back to Baghdad to find ways to accelerate a transfer of power to an Iraqi government. The unspoken message: Making it work is Bremer’s responsibility.

Poor Paul. The Pentagon refuses to concede the need to call in more troops to stamp out the insurgency, and muffles any talk from the uniformed leadership that suggests otherwise. The White House leadership hamstrings the Pentagon by bungling our diplomatic efforts so severely that only a few countries have sent troops to help, forcing the U.S. to dip well into its reserve force, and to extend soldiers’ tours to an exhausting 12 to 14 months. Yet Bremer is somehow going to singlehandedly clean up the mess.

But what does the White House have in mind as a solution?

The Bush administration plans to support the creation of a reconstituted governing body in Iraq that will assume a large degree of sovereignty by next summer — and possibly end control by the U.S.-led occupation before the 2004 presidential election.

The decision was reached after two days of hastily organized talks at the White House with L. Paul Bremer, top U.S. administrator in Iraq, in an attempt to accelerate the political transition, one of two prerequisites, along with security, for the eventual U.S. withdrawal from Iraq.

The decision represents a major shift in U.S. political strategy. Mirroring the U.S. military strategy of “Iraqification,” Washington now wants to hand over as much responsibility for the political process as is feasible, as fast as it is feasible.

“The focus is how to get to an interim government that can bear the weight of sovereignty and authority — and to whom we can turn the keys over,” said a well-placed U.S. official who requested anonymity.

People who want a stable and democratic Iraq can’t possibly see this as good news. Establishment of a reliable security force and a democratic legislature takes time — and no matter what the inflated numbers emanating from the Pentagon regarding Iraqi security personnel suggest, stampeding into Iraqification could leave the country in the hands of people ill-prepared to run a government or secure the streets.

The only clear upside of that course of action is strictly political: it lets the White House toss the situation to Iraqis to hold together for long enough for the president to declare victory and get out. War proponent David Adesnik of OxBlog all but admits as much:

Bremer and the Bush administration principals [have] decided to schedule Iraq’s first national elections for early to mid-2004, rather than the end of the year. Rather than waiting for the emergence of a constitution that would govern the electoral proces, the government elected early next year will have a mandate to define the constitutional drafting process.

According to the WaPo,

Th[is] decision represents a major shift in U.S. political strategy. Mirroring the U.S. military strategy of “Iraqification,” Washington now wants to hand over as much responsibility for the political process as is feasible, as fast as it is feasible.

When you read something like that, your gut says that the Administration is getting ready to cut and run. I don’t believe that just yet, but the prospect is going to gnaw at me.

Pardon me for saying that I don’t think it’s going to gnaw at the Bush administration’s conscience. [Such as it is.]

Sounds Abound Around Town

Atlantans who revere quality music have a good deal of concertgoing to do over the next few months — starting on Sunday, when the Tell Us the Truth tour on behalf of opponents of media consolidation brings Billy Bragg, Lester Chambers, Steve Earle, Tom Morello, Boots Riley of the Coup and Mike Mills of R.E.M. to the Variety Playhouse.

From there, the options roll on, and on, and on. At Georgia Tech, the Ferst Center has noted balladeer Peter Schickele — also known as P.D.Q. Bach — booked for a performance on, you guessed it, February 14. Down the highway at Spivey Hall, meanwhile, the calendar lists appearances by Anonymous 4 [December 7], the Brad Mehldau Trio [January 24] and the Hilliard Ensemble [April 18].

So many choices, so little time … anyone care to save me the trouble of having to decide which concerts make the cut by buying me a ticket package to cover them all? Any volunteers?

All Mixed Up

When I got home from the Blog Brouhaha the other night, I had too much energy to go to bed right then — so to pass an hour or so, I started flipping through iTunes and slapping tracks together at random until I had a nice, upbeat 65-minute-long bricolage. I’m still drawing a blank on a name, but I can give you a track listing:

1. “5-Piece Chicken Dinner,” Beastie Boys
2. “It’s Only Divine Right,” the New Pornographers
3. “Oh My God,” A Tribe Called Quest
4. “Tripping Billies [live],” Dave Matthews Band
5. “Crash on the Barrelhead,” Old 97’s
6. “The Boy With the Thorn in His Side,” The Smiths
7. “Hey Ya!”, Outkast
8. “One Foot in the Grave,” Pernice Brothers
9. “Outtasite [Outta Mind],” Wilco
10. “Buggy Ride,” Wynton Marsalis
11. “If I Only Had a Brain,” MC 900 Foot Jesus
12. “Funky Days Are Back Again,” Cornershop
13. “Bizarre Love Triangle,” Frente!
14. “Tonight, Tonight,” Smashing Pumpkins
15. “Hit,” Sugarcubes
16. “Tanto Tempo,” Bebel Gilberto
17. “I’ve Been to Memphis,” Lyle Lovett
18. “The Girls Want to Be With the Girls,” Talking Heads
19. “Here’s Where the Story Ends,” The Sundays

Thoughts? Quibbles? Requests for copies? Expressions of undying awe?

Glenn Reynolds, Mind Reader

Every blogger’s favorite Knoxville-based law professor says [with emphasis added]:

Somebody just sent me a “but Bush said the war was over!” bit of snarkmail. Uh, no, he didn’t. Bush actually said that major combat was over in Iraq. The war on terror — really the war on fundamentalist Islamic terrorists, and those who back them — is nowhere near over. Bush knows that, and he’s said it repeatedly.

I actually got several variations on this theme, from antiwar types who always seem glad when people die in Iraq, so long as they’re Americans or our allies. They’re usually the same people who puff up if you “question their patriotism.”

I don’t question it. They’ve put its existence beyond question by wishing for America to lose.

Wow — he couldn’t have described me any better if he’d put me under hypnosis. In fact, just today, I fired my pistol into the air and sprayed bubbly all over my office after hearing the great news about the bombing at that Italian carabinieri station. Happy days are here again!

Rhetoric like that — aside from making me stare daggers in its spewers’ general direction — has just about driven me to the point of hauling a snarky slogan of mine out of cold storage, before war backers stampede beyond the point of parody and do it for me: “We’re not Americans; we’re Democrats!”

No Need to Get Sor[os]

For Republican National Committee spokeswoman Christine Iverson, and anyone else protesting the weight that billionaire financier George Soros has thrown behind three young progressive outfits, I have two responses:

1. Tom Monaghan;

2. Richard Mellon Scaife.

Thanks for your time.

No Amount of Money …

… is enough to make up for the pain and suffering experienced by Gulf War veterans tortured in Iraq, according to the White House. And it means that literally:

This exchange between Scott McClellan and Helen Thomas really needs to be read in its entirity to grasp the deep, black cynicism that characterizes the Bush administration’s view, but as a public service, we here at Muse HQ provide the following truncated version — edited but not altered:

Q Scott, there are 17 former POWs from the first Gulf War who were tortured and filed suit against the regime of Saddam Hussein. And a judge has ordered that they are entitled to substantial financial damages. What is the administration’s position on that? Is it the view of this White House that that money would be better spent rebuilding Iraq rather than going to these former POWs?

MR. McCLELLAN: There is simply no amount of money that can truly compensate these brave men and women for the suffering that they went through at the hands of Saddam Hussein’s brutal regime. That’s what our view is.

Q White House is standing in the way of them getting those awards, those financial awards, because it views it that money better spent on rebuilding Iraq?

MR. McCLELLAN: Again, there’s simply no amount of money that can truly compensate these brave men and women for the suffering —

Q Why won’t you spell out what your position is?

MR. McCLELLAN: I’m coming to your question. Believe me, I am. Let me finish. Let me start over again, though. No amount of money can truly compensate these brave men and women for the suffering that they went through at the hands of a very brutal regime, at the hands of Saddam Hussein. … But again, there is simply no amount of compensation that could ever truly compensate these brave men and women.

Q Just one more. Why would you stand in the way of at least letting them get some of that money?

[snip]

MR. McCLELLAN: That’s why I pointed out that that was an issue that was addressed earlier this year. But make no mistake about it, we condemn in the strongest possible terms the torture that these brave individuals went through —

Q — you don’t think they should get money?

MR. McCLELLAN: — at the hands of Saddam Hussein. There is simply no amount of money that can truly compensate those men and women who heroically served —

Q That’s not the issue —

MR. McCLELLAN: — who heroically served our nation.

Q Are you opposed to them getting some of the money?

[snip]

MR. McCLELLAN: This issue was addressed earlier this year, and we believe that there’s simply no amount of money that could truly compensate these brave men and women for what they went through and for the suffering that they went through at the hands of Saddam Hussein —

Q So no money.

For those of you having trouble following this, a brief translation:

There’s no amount of money that could compensate these brave men and women for the suffering that they went through at the hands of Saddam Hussein — therefore, we’re not going to give them any. This is our same basic position on welfare, I don’t understand what your problem is.

And that was Lesson No. 313 on how the Bush administration supports the troops, ladies and gentlemen. I tell you — with friends like these, do people in uniform need enemies?

Blogging the Brouhaha

Thanks to everyone who made the Big Blog Brouhaha over the weekend such a success. [So much of one, in fact, that I nearly made money on it.] People seemed to have a great time, and the fact that no blood was spilled — not to belabor that point, but still — should strike most of us as nothing short of miraculous.

Let’s hope for an even more varied group next time — but in the meantime, I owe shout-outs to the following:

• Jeneane @ Allied
• Melanie @ Brushstroke
• Michael @ Discount Blogger
• El Burro
• Jim Flowers
• Grouchy Old Cripple
• Jessica Harbour
• John Adams @ JZip
• Ricky @ North Georgia Dogma
• PhotoDude
• Dwight Meredith @ PLA and Wampum
• Adam @ A Single Guy in the South
• Kelley @ Suburban Blight; and
• Techlinks.

Thanks again, everybody. Make sure to check out what other people have to say — they probably remember more than I do, what with my having gotten confused from counting so much money.

No Contracts for America?

Juan Cole — a professor at the University of Michigan’s Middle Eastern affairs department — calls attention to a natural corollary of the “get-the-troops-out-now” argument:

Journalist Naomi Klein says, “It’s too late to stop the war, but it’s not too late to deny Iraq’s invaders the myriad economic prizes they went to war to collect in the first place … If every last soldier pulled out of the Gulf tomorrow and a sovereign government came to power, Iraq would still be occupied: by laws written in the interest of another country; by foreign corporations controlling its essential services; by 70% unemployment sparked by public sector layoffs. Any movement serious about Iraqi self-determination must call not only for an end to Iraq’s military occupation, but to its economic colonisation as well.”

First off, I don’t agree with Klein on needing to get the troops out. As much as Bush has bungled the situation, leaving Iraq now would create a power vacuum that would cause more trouble for America, over the long haul, than spending the time and money required to put the country on its feet.

That said, even William Kristol, a hardcore neoconservative, admits we need more soldiers in Iraq. As long as our troop committments there and elsewhere have our army stretched to the breaking point, that means recruiting help from other nations — and drawing other countries in might require, as a quid pro quo, opening the reconstruction market to firms based overseas.

That raises a question for Bush, or the Democrat who succeeds him: has the administration written the terms for its contracts with Halliburton, Bechtel, SAIC, and so on so stringently that any effort to wriggle out of them, even if done in the national interest, would incur massive government contract liabilities? If so, the government could wind up losing money on reconstruction both coming and going — first because of the lack of protection against profiteering in Iraq-related appropriations bills, and then because of litigation when diplomatic pressures force the government to put the contracts aside.

Soul for Sale. Inquire Within.

Cartoonist Mike Luckovich gets in the definitive snub of Zell Miller:

What more can anyone say?

Laws for Sale. Inquire Within.

Corporate America continues to run up the score against the environment, thanks to the Harken-Halliburton Bush administration:

• According to The New York Times, a recent rule change recommended by the Cheney energy task force has forced lawyers for the Environmental Protection Agency to drop 50 ongoing cases and investigations under the Clean Air Act.

• A pending change in the agency’s interpretation of the Clean Water Act, meanwhile, would strip federal protection from 20 percent of the wetlands outside of Alaska, says the Los Angeles Times.

• In the middle of all that, administration officials squeezed out enough time to yank a team of scientists from a years-long study — which had come within weeks of completion — on bringing Army Corps of Engineers practices on the Missouri River into compliance with the Endangered Species Act.

I tell you — have Bush’s donors got the best government money can buy, or what?

T-M, T-M-Q, I Need You …

While Gregg Easterbrook still has yet to announce his plans for the post-Disney purge Tuesday Morning Quarterback [for the sordid backstory, read here], there’s still a small miracle to report for nerdy sports fans. A blogger from New York named Tien Mao — God bless ‘im — went into the proverbial dumpster to rescue the TMQ archives from oblivion.

Mao has text-only copies of the old columns at his website — and since Easterbrook owns the copyrights, Mao’s in no danger from the Disney legal department. If you’re in the mood for talk about the Washington Indigenous Peoples or NFL haiku, go on over and get your fix.

Spinanity

Has Spinsanity jumped the shark?

As much as I admire the site, one gets the distinct sense these days the writers are at a loss for material. Case in point: this post, in which poor Ben Fritz bends himself into a pretzel from fumbling for reasons to blame both sides in the debate over whether the president called Iraq an ‘imminent threat.’ A sample, starting with his blockbuster conclusion:

As a factual matter, conservatives are largely correct and liberal critics and journalists are guilty of cheap shots or lazy reporting. However, the evidence is not completely clear and both sides are guilty of distorting this complex situation for political gain. Specifically, while there’s some evidence indicating the Bush administration did portray Iraq as an imminent threat, there’s much more that it did not. Those attempting to assert that the White House called Iraq an imminent threat are ignoring significant information to the contrary. Similarly, those who say the Bush administration never used the phrase or implied as much are ignoring important, though isolated, evidence.

Former White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer affirmed questions from reporters using the phrase “imminent threat” to describe the administration’s case against Iraq … [but] it’s important to keep in mind that he never uttered the words himself …. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld suggested that Iraq may be an imminent threat and described its biological weapons with a similar term, “immediate threat” …. This evidence is paltry, however, when compared to the times when Bush specifically argued that Iraq was an enemy for which the concept of “imminent threat” was insufficient.

[M]any liberal critics have … misinterpreted the meaning of the word “imminent” to argue that the Bush administration made a case that Iraq was an imminent threat, even if it never said the words. … Saying that Iraq could attack the US soon or might enable terrorists to do so is not the same thing, however, as arguing that Iraq was poised to attack the US. That’s what “imminent” means.

However, some conservatives have gone overboard in their criticism of Democrats, claiming it is unfair to use the phrase at all. … [But the liberals’] unfair attacks do not make it legitimate for Bush supporters to jump on any critic who uses the phrase, however, or claim that nobody in the administration ever suggested Iraq could pose an “imminent threat.” Complexity is not an excuse for cheap shots from either side.

Pardon me — my eyes glazed over for a second there.

We all love nuance, and I’m keen for fairness, but the bloggermeisters at Spinsanity seem to have fallen into the cognitive trap of thinking they have to dish out punishment in equal measure to both sides. No, no, no. Maintaining evenhandedness may oblige them to point out pettifoggery wherever they see it — but if they see more dissembling on one side of an argument, they need to criticize that side.

This post, instead of observing that standard, reads as a masterpiece of timidity. Fritz gives readers a ‘six in-one-hand, half-dozen-the-other’ argument, and neutralizes whatever point he tried to make by straining for reasons to whack both sides in equal measure. For instance:

1. “Saying that Iraq could attack the US soon or might enable terrorists to do so is not the same … as arguing that Iraq was poised to attack the US. That’s what “imminent” means.” Huh?! Parsing plain language with that degree of exactitude is a bit like looking at an elephant through an electron microsope. Take a look at a definition of ‘poised’:

   • “[h]eld balanced or steady in readiness: stood poised for the jump.”

   Now, ‘ready’:

   • “Prepared or available for service, action, or progress: I am ready to work.”

   Fritz wants us to agree, more or less, that being prepared to attack is not the same as being able to attack. Well, that could be right — but why proceed from there to a rhetorical spanking? The difference is entirely a matter of semantics; for Fritz to claim dibs on the one true meaning what the administration said reads all manner of valid interpretations out of the dictionary.

2. “Those attempting to assert that the White House called Iraq an imminent threat are ignoring significant information to the contrary.” Does the White House contradict itself? Very well, it contradicts itself. It is large; it contains multitudes. Some of them said:

   Here’s how Vice President Cheney described the threat in August 2002: “What we must not do in the face of a mortal threat is give in to wishful thinking or willful blindness.”

   A month later, Bush called Iraq an “urgent threat to America.”

   The next month, he described the threat like this: “Iraq could decide on any given day to provide a biological or chemical weapon to a terrorist group or individual terrorists. … Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof — the smoking gun — that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.”

   Or Fleischer two days after that: “Another way to look at this is if Saddam Hussein holds a gun to your head even while he denies that he actually owns a gun, how safe should you feel?”

   Or the president justifying war as it got under way: “The people of the United States and our friends and allies will not live at the mercy of an outlaw regime that threatens the peace with weapons of mass murder.”

   Mortal threat. Urgent threat. Clear evidence of peril. Holds a gun to your head. Threatens. Aha! But they didn’t say imminent!

   Yes — and so what? Officials may have done a striptease with the precise word as thought they were playing Taboo, but the plain meaning of those statements looks as clear as the proverbial mushroom cloud on the president’s smoking gun. The fact that on other days — say, the second week of the month, and alternating Tuesdays — the administration said something completely different doesn’t oblige its opponents to wipe their minds of every incriminating statement made before.

So yes, by all means — stop the spinsanity. But stick to going after actual spin, instead of playing ‘gotcha!’ over jots and tittles.

Zellraiser

Just as the sun comes up and the creek runs wet, Zell Miller continues his scorched-earth campaign against the Democratic Party. The latest spark for his outrage: the writing of an unreleased draft memorandum on investigating White House mishandling of intelligence.

“I have often said that the process in Washington is so politicized and polarized that it can’t even be put aside when we’re at war. Never has that been proved more true than the highly partisan and perhaps treasonous memo prepared for the Democrats on the Intelligence Committee.

“Of all the committees, this is the one single committee that should unquestionably be above partisan politics. The information it deals with should never, never be distorted, compromised or politicized in any shape, form or fashion. …

“If what has happened here is not treason, it is its first cousin.”

Two thoughts:

1. Let me get this straight: the modern-day answer to Aaron Burr, a former vice president who tried to have his own nation built to spec from American territory west of the Appalachians, and still beat a treason charge … is a mid-level Senate staffer who wrote a memo that his boss tossed out?

2. More to the point — a Republican-controlled White House:

   • asks for intelligence that supports going to war;
   • doesn’t get as much as it needs;
   • plows ahead by making a case that exaggerates the evidence it has;
   • gets caught in the exaggeration;
   • goes after the whistleblower by outing his wife as a covert CIA agent;
   • finds out it broke a federal law in the process;
   • tries to change the subject by asking the Republican-controlled Senate Intelligence committee to point a finger at intelligence officials for the entire fiasco.

   In response, the ranking Democrat on the Senate intelligence committee:

   • asks an aide to look at options for getting around Republican efforts to block investigation of the White House.

   Now Zell pipes up, after saying nothing for all that time, to blame Democrats for politicizing intelligence?! Christ almighty … pardon me, but that bulls^#* is so thick you could use it as a brick.

If nothing else, this is a worthwhile educational experience — he’s proving every time he opens his mouth that a mind is a terrible thing to waste.

Ladies and Gentlemen, Boys and Girls …

… I bring you the first ever Big Atlanta Blog Brouhaha, coming this Saturday to a Five Seasons Brewing Company near you. The nitty-gritty details:

Date: Saturday, November 8
Time: From 7 p.m. ’til …
Location: Five Seasons Brewing Company, 5600 Roswell Road, Atlanta [on Roswell Road just inside I-285]
Why? Why not? You’ll get hijinks and merriment aplenty — but beyond that, it’s …

• A chance to meet the men and women behind the keyboards — c’mon, admit it, you know you want to;
• A chance to shoot the breeze and bounce ideas around, including the Atlanta-based group blog that PhotoDude, Jessica Harbour, the crew at ShiftyEye and I want to start; and
• Just one word: beer.

C’mon, why delay? RSVP today — or drop a note in the comments if you have questions.

If You Live in Northern Virginia …

… make sure to get out and support my friends Chap Petersen and Steve Shannon, both running in contested races for seats in the House of Delegates. Help me expand my political reach into the Old Dominion — vote early and vote often, preferably before 7 p.m.

Thou Shalt Not Blaspheme the Church of Reagan

… at least if you’re a leading honcho at CBS. [Emphasis added.]

Under pressure from Republican and conservative groups, CBS is expected to announce as early as today that it is canceling its plans to run a two-part mini-series in November deconstructing the Ronald Reagan presidency, two people close to the decision said last night.

They said the film would most likely instead be handed over to CBS’s pay-cable sibling, Showtime.

The announcement would perhaps the first time a major broadcast network has ever removed a completed project from its schedule because of political pressure and under the threat of an advertising boycott.

… CBS executives have been reworking the film over the last week, trying to fix what many critics — none of whom had seen the film and were relying mostly on a report in The New York Times about its contents — called inaccurate and unfair portrayals of the former president.

Let’s not go over board and call this censorship — on the face of things, this doesn’t qualify, because no one in government had a hand in muscling the show off the air. The party in control of two out of three branches of government, however — and in the driver’s seat at the Federal Communications Commission — did weigh in, in the person of its chairman, Ed Gillespie:

Worried about how former president Ronald Reagan and his wife, Nancy, are portrayed in an upcoming CBS miniseries, the Republican Party asked the network Friday to submit the program to historians for review or label it as not historically accurate.

… “To avoid any confusion as to what constitutes treating the President, Mrs. Reagan and the Reagan administrations in an honest sort of way, I respectfully request that you allow a team of historians to review the program for historical accuracy,” Gillespie wrote.

“If you’re unwilling to do so, I respectfully request that you inform your viewers via a crawl every 10 minutes that the program is a fictional portrayal of the Reagans and the Reagan Presidency, and they should not consider it to be historically accurate.”

Geez. He might as well have followed that with “or else.”

Gillespie has a right to his opinion, of course. But for the party to make this kind of hullabloo about the lack of balance in a miniseries [those notable bastions of accuracy] while holding a firm line against the Fairness Doctrine that used to require balance in news media … now that’s rich.

At any rate, this doesn’t amount to censorship — but it is yet another episode of the Republicans stomping all over the rules of decorum under which most right-thinking people considered unseemly to do such a thing. As for what I think of that, I think D. Clay Smith put it best:

… [G]row up you bunch of babies.

Couldn’t have put it better myself.

Link-a-palooza!

… over in the On the Side section today. Go crazy.

… So How Was Yours?

Time to adjust the honey-to-vinegar ratio here at the Green[e]house. Every blogger needs catch his breath from time to time — and besides, after a while, bashing Zell Miller loses its fun.

• After the last couple of weeks, I have a newfound appreciation for old partner-in-crime Wyeth Ruthven. Speechwriting — how come no one ever told me this? — is tough work.

  I spent a few days last week drafting a commentary on a serious topic — namely, state and regional governments’ abdication of responsibility when it comes to solving Atlanta’s traffic problems. The research went like clockwork, as always. But the writing? Oi … I haven’t pulled that many all-nighters since law school. My body clock wants payback, and sooner or later I may have to give iiii… zzzzz — Huh?! Oh — sorry, I nearly dozed off there.

• With that speech out of the way, I have a huge payday coming … er, someday. I missed a key detail about working with city officials, apparently: your fees, if you can believe it, come through the city payroll system. Imagine that.

  I would say that waiting for my cash to shake loose has been like watching paint dry … but that would be unfair to paint. If push comes to shove, I may surreptitiously put the PayPal™ Tin Cup out while I let Sherwin-Williams city hall finish my paperwork — but if I do, rest assured that I’ll limit my ambitions to a bit less than what Atrios or Josh Marshall asked for. [That said, if anyone wants to buy the Green[e]house a fresh laptop, or plane tix to New Hampshire … ]

• Ain’t nothin’ gonna break my stride [love that Matthew Wilder!] — but some weekends, the Virginia football squad comes pretty darned close. Case in point: on Saturday, I checked with the Virginia sports home page, and found out we had lost to North Carolina State. Before I could even read the recap, though, the page — as if to add insult to injury — made me wait for a godforsaken Flash animation plugging QB Matt Schaub for the Heisman Trophy.

  Uhhhh, guys? No. If I ever see that ad again, it’ll be too soon.

• With EMusic counting the days until it can ditch its all-you-can-download business model, I’m going full speed to get my money’s worth out of the service. Problem is, “speed” is a relative term. I use dialup at home, and that makes for pretty long odds against fetching the 50 or so albums I have eyes on before my time runs out.

  The pressure has forced me into triage, but the service has so many good artists [think Pixies, Pavement, and Pizzicato 5 — and that’s just the P’s] that tossing any of them aside is tough work. On the bright side, though, I can listen to working copies of Doolittle and Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain for the first time in years; that alone almost makes the money I’ve spent worth it.

• Once again, I won kudos this year for my award-winning Halloween costume. I dressed up as a young urban preppie — and I pulled the look off pretty darned well, if I can say so myself.

  Did my getup fetch me much candy? No — although no one seemed to notice, come to mention it, that I practically pitched camp near the Krispy Kremes at a Saturday night party I went to. But I did get good results from pitching woo at a guest I’ve wanted to schmooze for months now [sorry, I’m not telling who] — and any costume that works for that facet of life works well enough for me.

Zell If I Know

Zell Miller (?-Ga.) went on Meet the Press this morning to explain how a Democratic senator could endorse Bush, but from what I saw, he left most Democrats just as baffled as they had been before. I’ll give you a rundown, with my comments in italics.

• On the Democratic presidential candidates: “I respect all of them, and they’re good and decent people, but they are so far afield in wherever they’re going in this campaign. I mean, here they have adopted the worst possible features of the McGovern campaign. That is, get out, at any cost. Give up, come home, quit.”

  Huh? Who said that? Dennis Kucinich? One out of nine? Let’s see … nope — that’s not “most.” What about Howard Dean?

  “It is vital to our chances of success that the Bush Administration redouble its efforts to internationalize the military and civilian presence and to speed up the stabilization and rebuilding process. We cannot afford to fail.”

  Wesley Clark?

  “[W]e need a strategy for success in Iraq, and we need it now. I call upon the current administration to put forth a plan to stabilize Iraq and bring our allies on board.”

  John Edwards?

  “Edwards supported the war to remove Saddam Hussein from power, and he has been an outspoken proponent of a strong US commitment to help the Iraqi people rebuild their lives and develop rule of law and democracy.

  “Edwards believes that the United States cannot rebuild Iraq alone, and must bring other countries and institutions into this important effort.”

  Joe Lieberman?

  “I would urge the president to … [c]ommit more U.S. troops and resources to Iraq. Despite the president’s assertion that we have enough troops there, we clearly need both more forces and the right kinds of forces — and we need them now. In Kosovo today there are 16 peacekeepers for every 1,000 citizens; in Iraq, a much more dangerous and tumultuous place, the ratio is less than half that.”

  And Zell Miller says all of them want us to leave?! If that’s what they meant, they have a funny way of saying it.
• On Howard Dean’s comment that he “still want[s] to be the candidate for guys with Confederate flags in their pickup trucks”: “Howard Dean knows about as much about the South as a hog knows about Sunday. This must be his Southern strategy. And I can tell you right now, that that’s the same kind of stereotype, that’s the same kind of character trait that I write about in this book. … This is not the South that Howard Dean thinks it is. Sure, we drive pickups, but on the back of those pickups, you see a lot of American flags. It’s the most patriotic region in the country. And you see hardworking individuals that want to instill values in their children, and you see a very, very strong work ethic in the South. He doesn’t understand the South.”

  Eh? Wot? Maybe Dean whistles Dixie with the best of ’em, maybe he doesn’t … but this is a lousy quote from which to judge. As CNN clarifies:

  It was at least the second time Dean publicly used the Confederate flag to describe Southern voters who often vote for Republicans.

  Dean previously used the flag reference during a February meeting of the Democratic National Committee.

  At that event, Dean received a rousing ovation from the crowd when he said, “White folks in the South who drive pickup trucks with Confederate flag decals on the back ought to be voting with us, and not [Republicans], because their kids don’t have health insurance either, and their kids need better schools too.”

  See anything wrong with that? See any insidious playing to “stereotypes” and “character traits”? Me neither. Nor does Jeanne D’Arc:

  Am I missing something? I don’t hear anything whatsoever in Howard Dean’s statement that suggests support for the Confederate flag or pandering to “lovers of the Confederate flag.” What I hear is a simple statement that people are being manipulated by issues like the flag to vote against their own self-interest. Isn’t that pretty obvious, and isn’t it a good thing for Democrats to understand and deal with?

  Not to Miller, apparently. Go figure.
• On Wesley Clark: “[W]ith all due respect to Wesley Dean [sic], he is no ‘Old Hickory.’ I can tell you that. I have a tremendous respect for anyone who wears the uniform, anyone who has been shot at by our enemies. But when your last boss, in this case General Hugh Shelton, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, says that you lack integrity, that’s a pretty strong indictment. No integrity? I mean, how would you like to be taking that reference around whenever you’re looking for a new job?”

  Disingenuousness, thy name is Zell. You could take Shelton’s word about Clark, since he’s Clark’s old boss — but Bill Clinton was also Clark’s old boss, not to mention his old boss’s boss. How does he feel?

  “Earlier [in September], The New York Times reported that Bill Clinton said there were two rising stars in the Democratic Party — his wife, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, and Clark.”

  Oh. I tell you, having an ex-president’s high praise in your reference file … boy, that’s gotta hurt.
• On Bush and the federal budget:
  • Tim Russert: You wrote a — it was a compilation of your speeches, Listen to This Voice: Selected Speeches of Zell Miller. Let me refer you to one from 1996, Governor — or Senator, now Governor — now Senator, former Governor. And this was Zell Miller in 1996 before the Democratic Party Training Academy: “The real story of what happened to ‘We the people’ is that the Republicans sold us out, with a generation of trickle-down economics that blew the deficit sky-high, drove poverty through the roof, squeezed the middle class like a lemon at a county fair. They gave themselves the gold mine and they gave the rest of us the shaft.”

    And Democrats would say, “That’s the real Zell Miller. That’s the old Zell Miller, because he now voted for the Bush tax cut and that’s what the Bush tax cut has done to the country, what he was telling us the Reagan tax cut did.”

  • Sen. Miller: Here’s what the Bush tax cut has done to the country, that kind of economy right now. I know The New York Times had a time printing this, but “Economy records speediest growth since the mid-1980s.” That’s what the tax cuts have done. I have always been a tax cutter. I was a tax cutter whenever I was governor. I took the sales tax off of groceries and I cut the income tax twice. I came up here intending to be a tax cutter.
  • Russert: What about the deficit…
  • Miller: We…
  • Russert: … $500 billion?
  • Miller: The deficit is there not because of the tax cuts. The deficit is there because we have been in a recession and we’re a country at war. And you always run a deficit in those kind of times. Also, a deficit I would say is there because of a lot of wild spending by the Democrats.

  So we have the “speediest growth since the 1980s,” but a half-trillion dollar deficit because we’re stuck in a recession? Be careful, Zell — doing an about-face that fast might give a man whiplash.

  As for his attempt to blame the deficit on the war: what is this, the Bush campaign blog? I may not be a professor like Zell, but even I learned enough math in grade school to tell the senator he needs to check his work:

  [T]he cost of war, though by no means trivial, is responsible for only a small share of the deficits we face. … The President’s tax cuts are a much more significant cause. Congressional Budget Office data indicate that in 2003 and 2004, the cost of enacted tax cuts is almost three times as great as the cost of war, even when the cost of increases in homeland security expenditures, the rebuilding after September 11, and other costs of the war on terrorism — including the action in Afghanistan — are counted as “war costs,” along with the costs of the military operations and subsequent reconstruction in Iraq.

  Oh, and Zell, about this “wild spending by the Democrats”: Far be it from me to question your memories of our bacchanalian orgy by the fisc, but tell me — how exactly did that spending take place? Last time I checked, the GOP had us outnumbered by 225 to 208 in the House, and 51 to 48 in the Senate. If the Democrats managed to get the run of the Treasury with margins like that, today’s Republicans must be the biggest suckers alive.

  But don’t take my word, Zell; try listening to the Cato Institute instead.

  Under Bush, total outlays will have risen $408 billion in just three years to $2.272 trillion: an enormous increase in federal spending of 22 percent. … But the real truth is that national defense is far from being responsible for all of the spending increases. According to the new numbers, defense spending will have risen by about 34 percent since Bush came into office. But, at the same time, non-defense discretionary spending will have skyrocketed by almost 28 percent. Government agencies that Republicans were calling to be abolished less than 10 years ago, such as education and labor, have enjoyed jaw-dropping spending increases under Bush of 70 percent and 65 percent respectively.

  … [I]n inflation-adjusted terms, Clinton had overseen a total spending increase of only 3.5 percent at the same point in his administration. More importantly, after his first three years in office, non-defense discretionary spending actually went down by 0.7 percent. This is contrasted by Bush’s three-year total spending increase of 15.6 percent and a 20.8 percent explosion in non-defense discretionary spending.

  So let me get this straight: to stop wild spending by the Democrats, you signed up for three years of wild spending by the Republicans. Nice logic there, Zell.

If this is the best justification he can give for stabbing his party in the back, I have only one regret: that his wife couldn’t convince him to keep his duff parked in retirement in Young Harris.

Schtick-to-it-iveness

When Jack O’Toole seconded my motion to call Michael Totten’s never-ending disillusionment a schtick, Totten saw red:

What do you mean by schtick? That I don’t really believe what I’m writing? That I’m just making it up?

Please cite your evidence for your views. I am keenly interested to see someone defend that charge.

Huh? Take a look at that word “schtick” again, my friend — I do not think it means what you think it means. As O’Toole explains:

I suppose we should begin by defining the word “schtick.”

shtick also schtick or shtik ( P ) Pronunciation Key (shtk)

n. Slang
1. A characteristic attribute, talent, or trait that is helpful in securing recognition or attention: waiters in tropical attire are part of the restaurant’s shtick.
2. An entertainment routine or gimmick.

Now, perhaps the reach of Mr. Totten’s keen sensibilities exceeds my admittedly rather limited and literal-minded grasp, but I’ll be damned if I can even begin to tease a liar, liar pants on fire meaning from those words. So let’s dispense with Mr. Totten’s chief complaint right now; I did not in any way, shape, form or fashion accuse him of “making it up.” Rather, I suggested that his I’m a liberal but I ♥ the War on Terror stance has proved to be an effective attention-getting device for him. Which, clearly, it has. And good on him, I say. Hell, I wish I had half his traffic.

Ditto that. It’s a good schtick, if you ask me.

Aside from the hit count, though, I’m still at a loss for reasons to take it seriously. Note, for instance, how Totten glosses past the evidence I pointed to — which O’Toole incorporated by citation — and leapt straight to a wounded defense of his intellectual honesty. If Totten wanted to knock down charges of unseriousness, he could have contested my characterization of his crude dismissal of the possible good motives of war protesters, or clarified what he meant when he selectively quoted Howard Dean. Instead, he writes O’Toole’s opinion off as “psychoanalysis,” as if that settles the argument.

Well, no, Michael — nice try, but there’s more to it than that.

Here’s a small example of what I’m talking about — a little of “the evidence” Mr. Totten asked for in his reply — taken from one of his recent TCS columns:

Howard Dean made a promise. “On my first day in office, I will tear up the Bush Doctrine of preemptive war.” That would not be wise. Preemptive war has a respectable place in military history, and an absolutely crucial place in recent history. In 1967 Egypt, Syria, and Jordan moved their troops to the borders and promised to annihilate the state of Israel. Israel would not exist if it had not preemptively struck. And if Israel had not unilaterally destroyed Iraq’s Osirak reactor in 1981, Saddam Hussein would have had nuclear weapons on the day he invaded Kuwait.

Again, I agree with Mr. Totten’s basic take here; preemption is an arrow that we dare not remove from the nation’s quiver in this increasingly dangerous world. But why on earth would a self-described Democrat use this issue as an opportunity to imply that his party is weak on defense when the single greatest threat to the doctrine of preemption is this administration’s willful misuse of intelligence data in the days leading up to the invasion of Iraq? Why, in short, would a “liberal Democratic hawk” try to lay problems arising from George Bush’s tarnished credibility at Howard Dean’s feet?

The answer — to me, at least — seems clear: To further his Kausian reputation as a Liberal Democratic Teller of Hard Truths.

Yep, that nails it — except that I might have driven the point further by amending the last bit to read “Liberal Democratic Teller of Hard Truths that Republicans Love to Hear.”

Given how Totten himself admits that his “reaction to the [Democrats] is more visceral than intellectual,” I’m confounded that he’s so surprised to to have critics who don’t give his views the weight he mysteriously thinks they deserve. In the interest of helping him build a case that works outside the peanut gallery, though, let me offer a tip: when he can finally produce evidence that “Democrats … think it’s 1968 (or 1972) all over again,” or that Democrats have turned into born-again “isolationists,” then he should get back to us.