Whose Chalabi?

One of the more tangled webs of the pre-war planning and intelligence in Iraq was the US government’s controversial relationship with Iraqi opposition leader Ahmed Chalabi. I never knew quite what to make of Chalabi, who was often lionized by the conservative press and vilified by those who preferred to leave Saddam in power. But a report a few weeks ago by StratFor (available by email to subscribers) raises some interesting questions – to wit, whether Chalabi, a Shi’ite, has long had some allegiance or connection to the Iranian mullahs.
The mullahs, of course, have a wide variety of interests in Iraq, some of which have been threatened by our invasion but others of which have been helped; their long-term goal, presumably, would be to see a weak Iraq controlled by an easily manipulable Shi’ite government. While it doesn’t necessarily demean Chalabi’s usefulness to us if he has – rationally – worked with the mullahs just as he worked with us to obtain his objective of a Saddam-free Iraq, any connection to the Iranian regime should set off alarm bells as to his trustworthiness.
One thing StratFor noted about Chalabi’s background is that an Iranian connection could help explain much about the collapse of the bank he ran in Jordan until the late 1980s, which ended with a bank fraud conviction (of dubious validity) being entered against Chalabi in a Jordanian court. If Chalabi’s bank was used as a conduit for Iranian funds during the Iran-Iraq War, this would explain why the Jordanians were suddenly interested in shutting it down as soon as the war ended (lest that come to light), as well as why they didn’t treat Chalabi as a criminal so much as persona non grata, with the Crown Prince of Jordan personally escorting him out of the country.
A related question I’ve wondered about is how much of Chalabi’s Iranian connections have been known to some of the fiercer opponents of the Iranian regime who have also been big cheerleaders of Chalabi, such as Michael Ledeen (see here and here for examples of Ledeen saying glowing things about Chalabi). I could be wrong, but I thought I had read somewhere that Ledeen’s source on his charge that the Iranians were buying uranium in Iraq was a Chalabi contact . . . the plot, as always in that part of the world, is undoubtedly a thick one, and one that may never fully be known.

But Everybody Does It

Jeff Kent tries lamely to justify the possible prevalence of steroids in today’s game:

�Babe Ruth didn�t do steroids?� Kent was quoted as saying. �How do you know? … People are saying Lou Gehrig and Babe Ruth � how do you know those guys didn�t do steroids? So all of a sudden, you�ve got guys doing steroids now in the 20th century, 21st century? Come on.
�Keep going backward. Pete Rose? Who knows? … How do we know those guys were clean? Did they test those guys?�

Um, has Kent ever seen a picture of Ruth in the 30s or Pete Rose in the 70s? Maybe there was somebody out there experimenting with the stuff, but it’s a well-known fact you can document just by looking at photographs that before the late 80s it was largely believed (with a few exceptions like Honus Wagner and Stan Musial) that strength training was bad for ballplayers. I doubt much of anybody took steroids in baseball before around 1987-88 or so, when you began to see the first signs of guys lifting weights.

Get Unserious

I found it very revealing when Matt Yglesias suggested a few weeks ago that John Kerry should “really commit himself” to “build[ing] a viable democratic state in Iraq” . . . but that until the nomination was salted away he shouldn’t do so because it would “be unpopular with the primary electorate and possibly lead to a Dean-resurgence.”
Of course, with Dean out of the way, I’m still not holding my breath for Kerry to get serious. But it’s more than a little scary to hear from a commited Democrat the idea that the Democratic primary voters aren’t prepared to hear a serious, adult discussion about America’s role in the world or its strategy for winning the war on terror.

Another Take on the AL by Win Shares

Andrew Koch runs his own Win Shares-driven AL standings analysis, although he departs from my Established Win Shares Levels analysis (see here, here and here) in two ways, only one of which is an improvement:
1. He uses only 2003 WS, rather than a 2- or 3-year Established Performance Level. I prefer my approach, since a longer sample gives you a better look at a player’s abilities. Randy Johnson’s 2001 and 2002 are highly relevant to projecting him in 2004, for example, notwithstanding the injuries that wrecked his 2003. This also creates a second problem associated with the other adjustment.
2. He adjusts for the fact that a team’s players will wind up with a fixed number of plate appearances and innings pitched, and thus projects various players’ time upwards or downwards and adjusts them. In some ways this is an improvement, since my EWSL system doesn’t adjust down when a team picks up everyday players to ride the bench or, like the Indians, gives everyday jobs to a bunch of guys who didn’t play full seasons last year. In others, it’s not so good, because he has to make rough estimates about players who were hurt last season.
It’s a useful and interesting exercise, anyway, and I found it an interesting contrast, although his projected standings came out pretty close to mine anyway – both of us project the Yanks, Royals and Mariners to take the divisions, with the Red Sox winning the wild card as with 100+ wins but not finishing a particularly close second to the Yankees and with the AL Central as a whole having a lousy year.
Neither of us really has a formal adjustment for player age, of course (which is why I think the Angels should be favored above the Mariners and why I’m somewhat optimistic about the Twins), although Koch is certainly cognizant of the issue. Go check it out.

Ain’t No Crime

Judge Cedarbaum’s opinion in United States v. Stewart, 03 Cr. 717 (S.D.N.Y. Feb. 27, 2004), dismissing the securities fraud charge against Martha Stewart, is now available online in PDF form. (You can read a news account of the decision here). The case provides an interesting look at the difficulty of proving intent in criminal securities fraud cases, especially in situations such as this one, where the alleged misrepresentations did not relate directly to the business of the issuer.
The securities fraud charge was always somewhat novel, in that it accused Stewart of fraud in connection with the purchase and sale of stock in her own company, Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia (MSLO), by misrepresentations during the investigation of her sales of ImClone stock in which she [1] “described the [alleged standing order] agreement to sell ImClone at a predetermined price, [2] stated that her trade was proper and [3] denied trading on nonpublic information.” Slip op. at 5. For purposes of the analysis of the Rule 29 motion on the sufficiency of the evidence, the court assumed the falsity of these statements. Id. at 7 n.1. The court found sufficient evidence that Stewart, who owned 60% of MSLO stock in addition to being CEO, closely tracked the stock’s price (including the impact on that price of insider sales, as evidenced by an informal company policy restricting insider sales), and was aware of the importance of her personal reputation to the company, as well as evidence that MSLO stock began dropping on news of disclosure of the investigation into Stewart’s sale of ImClone stock.
The court’s dismissal was based on the finding that the jury would need to rely entirely on “speculation and surmise” to find beyond a reasonable doubt that Stewart’s statements were made with the intent to affect the price of MSLO stock, and that the issue could not be permitted to go to the jury where “the competing intentions appear to be nearly in equipoise.” Id. at 16, 20. As the court concluded, in light of the fact that Stewart had made no statements indicating a concern about the response of MSLO’s stock price to the ImClone controversy (and, apparently, had made no suspicious sales of MSLO stock):

Continue reading Ain’t No Crime

Why Is John Kerry Questioning A Vietnam Vet’s Patriotism?

John Kerry has been fond of claiming recently that the Bush Administration has broken faith with military veterans by cutting veterans’ benefits. As Bill Hobbs explains, this is fiction. But I have another question: as Hobbs notes, Kerry’s not only challenging Bush, he’s challenging Secretary of Veterans Affairs Anthony Principi. What’s Principi’s background?

A combat-decorated Vietnam veteran, . . . Mr. Principi is a 1967 graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis, Md., and first saw active duty aboard the destroyer USS Joseph P. Kennedy. He later commanded a River Patrol Unit in Vietnam’s Mekong Delta.

How dare Kerry question the commitment to our veterans of a decorated Vietnam veteran?
Of course, I’m being somewhat facetious here – Kerry’s claim that his own Vietnam service immunizes his national security record from criticism, like his other main blathering points about “special interests” and outsourcing, is so flimsy it doesn’t hold up under even the most minimal logical scrutiny. (As one of Tim Blair’s readers put it, “I think I finally understand why Kerry underwent the botox treatments. It’s so he could say all the things he does with a straight face. “). But it’s still fun applying the scrutiny.
Wonkette’s readers had some good ones as well:

* “Vote Kerry: He Led America To Victory In Vietnam!”

* “John Kerry: Pretending To Fight Against Special Interests Since Very Recently”

* “John Kerry Won’t Just Take A Stand On The Tough Issues – He’ll Take Two Or Three Of Them”

* “Kerry: Not in the pocket of most special interests.”

On the other hand, if you want an example of someone actually questioning Kerry’s patriotism, check out this, from NRO:

Continue reading Why Is John Kerry Questioning A Vietnam Vet’s Patriotism?

Over The Edge on Gay Marriage, Part II

Following up on yesterday’s argument . . . as I think you can tell, I’m hardly a bitter-ender on the substance of the gay marriage question. I don’t necessarily think that the world would spin off its axis if we had gay marriage . . . frankly, I hadn’t really thought about “gay rights” issues until maybe my senior year of college, and I’ve made a real effort since then to take in all sides of the issues. And while I don’t have the patience to read as much on these issues as Andrew Sullivan puts out, I do try to read his stuff on this. But what I do take very seriously is the Left’s concerted effort to impose radical social changes without ever getting the sanction of democratically elected representatives or explicit authority in the Constitution or statutes, and then turn around and call conservatives the radical ones.
Now, we’ve got yet another local official threatening to issue marriage licenses to gay couples, this time the mayor of New Paltz, New York (this is what you get for electing a 26-year-old Green Party mayor). As in California, this will suddenly put both the Governor and the state Attorney General in a very awkward position.
Tom Maguire, who’s been all over this issue, points us to Ramesh Ponnuru’s article on NRO essentially endorsing the same solution that Maguire, I and James Taranto would all prefer: an amendment that would do nothing more than leave exclusively to each state’s legislature the question of what kind of marriages or civil unions to approve. Indeed, the WSJ comes out with an editorial today endorsing precisely this position:

Now, even some who support a constitutional remedy wonder about the language. There is debate about whether the amendment’s language would bar states from endorsing civil unions, which Mr. Bush says they should be free to do. We think this entire issue should be decided in the states, by the people through their elected legislators. And if the voters want to alter the definition of marriage as a new social consensus develops, that should be their democratic right.

This is a popular position. Indeed, even Sullivan says “I will support a federal constitutional amendment that would solely say that no state is required to recognize a civil marriage from another state,” although he contends that we should first wait for the courts to bulldoze all the existing legislation on the matter – at which point, I do question whether he’d argue that it’s a “divisive” attempt to “roll back” the facts on the ground . . .
Given that the votes clearly will not be there for a more sweeping amendment – something such noted weak-kneed moderates as Tom DeLay seem to have already appreciated – those pushing for an amendment need to take what they can get. I agree with Taranto that the more modest solution would put John Kerry in even more of a terrible box than he’s already in (as opposed to his current position, in which he (1) says that opposing gay marriage is bigoted and divisive and (2) says that he opposes gay marriage), since the GOP could honestly portray its effort as one that preserves the status quo without casting it in stone. Kerry would then be forced to bet his chips on the losing hand of opposing his own position – or face the wrath of the Left within his own party.
Turning briefly to the merits of gay marriage, a few non-comprehensive thoughts:

Continue reading Over The Edge on Gay Marriage, Part II

Over The Edge on Gay Marriage, Part I

Well, looks like it’s time for me to talk about gay marriage. . . I didn’t choose the time or the terms of this debate, but then, neither did President Bush. Keep that in mind.
You see, like any controversy over the intersection of law with the culture, the gay marriage debate has both a substantive aspect (what the right outcome for society should be) and a procedural aspect (how we get there, who legitimizes the decision, how it’s enforced). And in this fight, the procedural issue is, in my view, a lot more troubling even than the substance.
On the merits, I first looked at this issue ten years ago, when I was in my first year of law school, and I came down in support of some form of civil union solution; I haven’t seen anything to change my mind since then. More on the substantive merits another day (this post is already too long) . . . but I can recall having a debate in my property class with a lesbian woman who thought it highly unrealistic to await a democratic resolution of the issue. She wanted it to come from the courts.
From sources around the blogosphere too numerous to link here, we’ve tended to see five basic lines of attack against the president’s decision to come down in favor of a constitutional amendment on the topic:
1. Ask why anybody cares who else is married.
2. Call the president and other opponents of gay marriage bigots.
3. Ask whether the president doesn’t have better things to do than worry about this issue.
4. Argue that we shouldn’t go amending the Constitution over this issue.
5. Suggest that this is all politically motivated.
These are deeply misguided arguments, and notwithstanding the fact that many of them are coming from people I otherwise respect and agree with on many other issues, they buy into the thuggish and dishonest tactics of the cultural Left, tactics that have been repeated so many times that those of us who consider ourselves social conservatives know exactly where this is going.

Continue reading Over The Edge on Gay Marriage, Part I

This Is Breaking News?

So, the other day I registered with Washingtonpost.com, so I could continue to read their articles online, and in the process I checked the box to receive breaking news alerts. I figured, yeah, I get a lot of email, but signing up for alerts on the real ‘hot news’ stories can’t hurt. So yesterday, I get my first one:
Spelman to Step Down
National Zoo director Lucy H. Spelman is planning to quit at the end of the year after a study found failings in animal care, a spokeswoman said today.
Now, I’m not saying that this isn’t a story worth reporting in the newspaper . . . but breaking news? This couldn’t wait until the morning paper?

TOP THIRTY SIGNS YOU’RE TURNING THIRTY

I wrote this one up two three years ago, when my friends and I were turning 30. Obviously, not all of these apply to me 😉 and #7 is rather dated now. But I thought I’d share:
TOP THIRTY SIGNS YOU’RE TURNING THIRTY
1. You refer to college students as “kids.”
2. You remember all the things that happened “twenty years ago this day.”
3. You’re the boss.
4. Athletes your age have started retiring.
5. They don’t write ’em like that anymore.
6. You realize your children won’t remember the 20th century.
7. You watched the Super Bowl halftime show and realized you were listening to Aerosmith when Britney Spears was in diapers.
8. Your mortgage is bigger than your student loans.
9. The first girl you kissed had a crush on Doug Flutie at the time.
10. You stop and listen when the TV news runs a story on Viagara.
11. You now have more hair on your arms than on your head.
12. You think they should do something about fake IDs.
13. “Relaxed fit” pants.
14. You remember when we wanted to party like it’s 1999.
15. You still get excited at hearing “Do you believe in miracles?”
16. There used to be lots of things you didn’t do because you had no money; now there are lots of things you don’t do because you have no time.
17. You pay someone to mow your lawn.
18. You look at the stock tables before the box scores.
19. You spend a lot of time on the Internet reading things written by people younger than you are.
20. You can’t believe Pete Rose is turning sixty.
21. You have fond memories . . . of reunions.
22. You don’t go to that bar anymore, you can’t even hear yourself think.
23. You just don’t get Eminem.
24. You remember when people said “space age” the way they now say “internet age.”
25. You’ve seen all four “Star Wars” films in the theater – the first time around.
26. In most photos of your childhood, you are wearing plaid pants.
27. Your first new car died.
28. Your year starts in January, not September.
29. You actually bothered to vote this time.
30. You know . . . whatsisname . . .
UPDATE: Yeah, when I wrote this I forgot how many years ago it was. Bad sign.

AL Central Established Win Shares Level Report

Moving on to the AL Central . . . you may have wondered, watching as the Yankees, Red Sox and Angels grew stronger while other teams East and West held their ground, who was going to lose all those games that other teams plan to win . . . look no further. This is one ugly division. There are only three players in the whole division with an EWSL of 20 or greater, which is one fewer than the Yankees have just in their infield (counting Posada).
This is the fourth in my series on Established Win Shares Levels; see here for an explanation of the EWSL method and ranking of the top 25 players, here for an explanation of the team-by-team method in the post on the AL West, and here for my AL East analysis (in which I noted a downgrade of the arbitrary rating of rookie starting pitchers from 7 Win Shares to 5). (I haven’t yet gone back and re-adjusted the AL East and West numbers after the Rodriguez-Soriano trade).
As I and others have noted before, EWSL isn’t a perfect tool for evaluating team rosters; again, what it measures is how much established major league talent is on each roster. A quick reminder on notations: players marked # are evaluated on their last 2 seasons rather than last 3; players marked * are evaluated only on 2003; and players marked + are rookies assigned an arbitrary WS total.
The AL Central:

Continue reading AL Central Established Win Shares Level Report

One’s A Convicted Pardoned Liar

In case you missed it, from late last week: did you know that the YES Network (presumably at the urging of George Steinbrenner, who was once convicted of making illegal campaign contributions to Richard Nixon), was a major donor to the group (also including such distinguished John Kerry supporters as Bob Torricelli) that ran particularly pointed anti-Howard Dean ads in Iowa (the ads that showed Osama bin Laden and questioned whether Dean had the experience to deal with him)?
One wonders whether YES’ anti-Dean position had anything to do with his threat to regulate the media.

How Many Times?

Meryl Yourish notes that since September 2000, Israel has seen more than 7,000 people killed or injured in terrorist attacks of its population of 5.4 million Jews . . . she asks how many September 11ths that adds up to, proportional to the U.S. population. Of course, when you check the link to the IDF statistics, it’s 928 killed and the rest wounded, including soldiers; the actual number of civilians killed is 653. If you just compare the 7,000 to the 3,000 or so killed on September 11, it’s more than 100 times our loss; if you compare the 653 number, it’s more like ten September 11ths. But no matter how you splice the numbers, it’s a heck of a lot of blood spilled in four years. It’s something to chew on, before condemning the Israelis for anything.

I Taunt You

On that purported Al Qaeda tape that the Mad Hibernian links to below, I thought there were two interesting things:
1. The Islamists accusing the French of “Crusader envy.” So much for the superiority of the French approach to the “simplistic” and “arrogant” American tack in getting a break from these nutballs.
2. There was something rather pathetic in the efforts to taunt Bush:

“Bush, fortify your targets, tighten your defense, intensify your security measures,” the tape recording warned, “because the fighting Islamic community � which sent you New York and Washington battalions � has decided to send you one battalion after the other, carrying death and seeking heaven.”

Sure, they could pull something off at any time . . . but until they do, this stuff sounds like bluster that wouldn’t be necessary if their operations weren’t severely crimped. Or, put another way:

I don’t want to talk to you no more, you empty headed animal food trough wiper. I fart in your general direction. Your mother was a hamster and your father smelt of elderberries. . . now go away before I taunt you a second time.

Halls of Relief

Not much blogging this morning, as I’m finishing up my Established Win Shares analysis of the AL Central, which is on deck for tomorrow morning (early preview: the Central stinks). In the meantime, if you haven’t already, head on over and check out the conclusion of Mike Carminti’s seemingly interminable but fascinating “Halls of Relief” series (I’ve only had time to read parts of it myself), in which he wraps up his history of relief pitching by stacking up the greatest bullpens of all time (there’s also links to the rest of the series). Nobody goes off on a tangent quite like Mike Carminti; he’s practically got enough material there for a book.

2000 Trivia

Answer: New Mexico, Oregon, Iowa and Wisconsin.
Question: In what four states in 2000 was Al Gore’s margin of victory over Bush smaller than the number of votes cast for Pat Buchanan?
In only two states – albeit enough to swing the election – did Nader outpoll Bush’s margin of victory: Florida and New Hampshire. If a third of New Hampshire’s 22,188 Nader voters had pulled the lever for Gore, he’d be president now.

Then Again, Don’t Bring It On

John Kerry hasn’t even sewn up the Democratic nomination, and already he’s complaining that he can’t handle criticism from President Bush and Republicans on his national security record and his actions after Vietnam. Of course, the hypocrisy of Kerry wanting to take Vietnam off the table after making it part of his answer to nearly every question is mind-bending, like if Howard Dean had suddenly claimed that the Iraq war shouldn’t be a political issue. So much for “BRING IT ON!”
Me, I prefer Jonah Goldberg’s approach. And come to think of it, so did Kerry’s surrogates not so long ago.
UPDATE: Kaus catches an even more egregious attempt by Kerry to bully his opponents into silence:

Kerry responds:“I don’t know what it is about what these Republicans who didn’t serve in any war have against those of us who are Democrats who did.”

Pump It Up!

John Perricone at Only Baseball Matters has been on a bit of a crusade to dial down the anti-steroids speculation and rhetoric around the game. He links here to this Reason Magazine article in which Dayn Perry argues that the adverse health risks of steroids haven’t been scientifically proven, and here he makes an essentially libertarian argument against regulating steroids, at least until there’s better science on the issue.
I’ve agreed before with the point Perricone makes repeatedly (see here and here for examples) that the media has been way too quick to point fingers at specific players (or, for that matter, quote generalized percentages of players) without any evidence. On the other hand, the lack of evidence is no excuse for giving up on the story; the answer is to keep digging.
I haven’t really digested Perry’s piece yet . . . I’m sympathetic to anti-junk-science arguments, but I’m not sure I buy the “there’s nothing wrong with being on steroids” argument, which sometimes tends to sound a bit too much like the tobacco executives for even my right-wing tastes. But it’s a perspective worth taking seriously.
I don’t doubt that there’s a lot of players out there who are clean, and that a lot of guys are bulking up with the help of supplements and the like that are perfectly legit but just way beyond what was available until recently. Still, I do wonder: I was a diligent 5-6-days-a-week weightlifter myself for about 4 years in college and law school, at an age when it’s a lot easier to build muscle mass than it is in your thirties. I started out weighing around 120 (I’m just under 5’10”), which was way underweight and down from where I’d been when I started college, and got up to about 140 in a year or so, but never got past that; I came away with a real appreciation of how hard it is to keep bulking up (then again, as you can guess from the numbers, my frame isn’t really designed for being Arnold Schwarzenegger).
Anyway, go follow the links; there’s a lot to chew on there.

Required Reading

I can’t say enough about the Mark Steyn piece the Mad Hibernian links to below . . . but another can’t-miss bit of political humor is today’s Dave Barry column, which is just packed with gags in the classic Barry style. One sample:

Yes, voters, I trust you, because I am one of you. I even talk like you. For example, when I’m campaignin’ in the South, I leave the “g” off the ends of words and I use old country expressions that express the homespun wisdom acquired by rural people over years of drinkin’ contaminated ground water, such as: “Don’t light a match till you know which end of the dog is barkin’.” As your President, I will govern the nation, or at least the South, in accordance with those words, whatever they may mean.

Read the whole thing.

Screwing the NFL?

Gregg Easterbrook takes severe issue with Judge Shira Scheindlin’s ruling, in Maurice Clarett’s case, striking down the NFL’s minimum age rule. I’m not sure if I agree with all his points, but Easterbrook certainly makes the case that the league has a valid interest in preserving a high quality of play and in keeping college football’s free publicity machine for future NFL stars going.

Last Call for Dean-Bashing

It appears for the moment that we’ve seen the last of Howard Dean as a candidate for national office for quite some time. Although he may be keeping his powder dry for 2008, I suspect that Dean’s 2004 problem – people think he’s nuts – is a hard one to overcome; ask Dan Quayle how hard it is to change an image that casts you as unpresidential.
Anyway, this makes it time to dump out the rest of my research on Dean, for future reference or just for the sheer malicious glee of kicking a man when he’s down:

Continue reading Last Call for Dean-Bashing

Who 3:16?

One observant viewer of the Super Bowl points out that CBS appears to have blotted out the contents of posters behind the end zone, and speculates that CBS may have been concealing “John 3:16” banners.* (Link via Stuart Buck).
*For the uninitiated, John 3:16 is the one sentence of the Bible that many Christians feel captures the essence of Christianity; I can still recite it from memory, as our sophmore theology teacher in high school made us memorize it for every weekly test: “For God loved the world so much that He gave us His only Son, so that all who believe in Him may not die, but have eternal life.”

Planetoid

Scientists have announced what they believe to be the discovery of “a frozen object 4.4 billion miles from Earth that appears to be more than half the size of Pluto and larger than the planet’s moon,” the largest discovery within our solar system since Pluto itself in 1930. The “planetoid,” “dubbed 2004 DW [they’ll need a better name], lies at the outer fringes of the Kuiper Belt, a swarm of frozen rock and ice beyond the orbit of Neptune.”

The Gathering Storm

A friend recently sent me an email about an event where a prominent baseball writer spoke freely about, among other things, the view that a certain well-known player is on steroids and another recently stopped taking them and has slimmed down dramatically . . . I won’t reprint the charges, since (1) they’re third-hand at best, (2) they weren’t really intended for public distribution, and (3) it’s not my place to smear the names of prominent players without any personal knowledge of the facts.
But face it: the fact that a well-known insider would make casual remarks about this stuff to strangers . . . what that says to me, really, is that the insiders know that the truth is coming out soon, and respecting a code of silence about it all doesn’t really serve much purpose anymore. (David Pinto has noted one prominent crack in the wall). I really, really don’t want to learn that one of my favorite players has been using steroids; chances are, you don’t either. It’s going to be unpleasant and distasteful all around. But as I noted in May of 2002, the truth is coming sooner or later. To me, it smells like sooner.

Principled Positions

Tim Noah, like Jonah Goldberg, thinks Howard Dean’s problem as a candidate was that he was a phony who didn’t really believe in his own left-wing campaign rhetoric. Both of them cite his more (comparitively) moderate record as Vermont governor. The Wall Street Journal, meanwhile, argues that Dean’s undistilled leftism and confrontational style made him “the most consequential loser since Barry Goldwater.”
I think the Journal is closer to the truth, and there’s an important point here about politicians and their convictions. The charge against Dean sometimes focuses on the idea that his strong anti-war and tax-hiking stands were calculated postures based on his assessment of the mood of the Democratic electorate in 2003. Kevin Drum has repeatedly made the same charge against Bush. Now, it’s fair game to point to inconsistencies in a man’s record and ask whether he really believes what he says. But in a representative democracy, it’s not necessarily fatal to hire leaders who echo what we want them to say, rather than what they’d do if they had their druthers. Many of our individual druthers, after all, aren’t so well thought-out.
No, what matters more than anything is not a politician’s fealty to his own internal principles but his ability to take a principled position and stick to it, whether he believes in it or not. Regardless of its sincerity, Howard Dean’s positions on Iraq and on the Bush tax cuts were principled positions: he made sure everyone knew precisely where he stood, he made all the arguments for those positions as forcefully as he could, and he left himself no wiggle room to back away if those positions were rejected by the voters or if (as happened with the capture of Saddam) his principled position was discredited by subsequent events. What we look for in leaders, especially presidents, is that ability: the willingness to say, “here I stand,” let the voters judge the merits of that stand, and keep faith with your promises, even when the going gets rough.
That doesn’t mean that you can never compromise; even a principled advocate can judge when to settle for the best deal that’s going to come. Think of John McCain’s approach to campaign finance reform or Ted Kennedy’s approach to universal government-provided health insurance, both clear examples of principled positions where (like the results or not) a legislator staked out a position and made things happen by tireless advocacy and leadership.
Part of what made Bill Clinton so frustrating to deal with was his allergy to principled positions, the difficulty of pinning him down on issues. But even Clinton took principled stands on occasion — sometimes by using his popular mandate to enact campaign promises like the Family and Medical Leave Act, sometimes by bucking his own party for the good of the economy (as with NAFTA and GATT), and, in the case of HillaryCare, pushing a principled stand far beyond the point where prudence counseled compromise.
Love him or hate him, President Bush has similarly taken a series of principled positions, albeit with exceptions (as where he abandoned many of his principles on the education bill and threw them overboard on McCain-Feingiold). In dealing with the Taliban and Saddam Hussein, Bush was unyielding in pursuit of our objectives, even in the face of many objections and obstacles along the way. On tax cuts, Bush has consistently staked out clearly understood objectives — there’s no question that Bush’s campaign got out in front of public demand for tax cuts and that the public identifies Bush with that position — and pushed for as much of his proposed cuts as he could get. Bush’s positions on Social Security, the Medicare prescription drug bill, judicial nominees, the faith-based initiative — you can fault his objectives or the degree of his follow-through, but you can’t doubt where Bush stands and that he’s been willing to weather criticism from many corners without changing course.
Which brings us to the core of the problem with John Kerry. As Will Saletan has put it:

Kerry’s more fundamental problem is his tendency to try to have everything both ways, chiefly by rigging his answers with caveats. He approaches political questions the way soldiers approach urban warfare: He never walks into a sentence without leaving himself a way out.

This is Kerry’s core problem. Try to cite back part of Kerry’s voting record, and he’ll cite votes going the other way. War with Iraq? Voted against the first one but said some good things about it, voted for the second one and campaigned against it, voted in between for the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998. Voted for the Patriot Act and No Child Left Behind and NAFTA, campaigned against all three. Campaigned strenuously for Kyoto, but voted for the anti-Kyoto resolution in the Senate. Opposes drilling in ANWR, but wants the unions to know he’s OK with it. Opposes gay marriage, but voted against the Defense of Marriage Act. . . . you get the picture. It’s not that Kerry doesn’t necessarily have principles; clearly, his instincts are quite liberal, as he’s often shown and as his voting record tilts. But there’s never been any point in John Kerry’s career when, as many another legislator has done, he took an issue, made it his own, and declared to all the world: here I stand, come with me. Dean’s not the only loser who got his way; in recent memory, Steve Forbes and Ross Perot also did much to shape the public agenda by taking stands on issues and forcing other candidates to deal with their ideas. But even if John Kerry wins, for what has he ever shown he would fight without backing down, come whatever grief may come his way?

Continue reading Principled Positions

Called It

This site’s third co-blogger, who blogs under the pseudonym Kiner’s Korner, has gotten out of the blog groove the last several months. But I have to give him credit here for an email he sent me January 30, after the New Hampshire primary:
Prediction:
Dean doesn’t actually win a single primary

I doubted him, but that’s exactly what happened.

The Dean Delusion

As Howard Dean exits stage left, it’s worth looking back at Clay Shirky’s widely-linked analysis of what went wrong:

[T]he hard thing to explain is not how the Dean campaign blew such a huge lead, but rather why we ever thought that lead actually existed. Dean’s campaign didn’t just fail, it dissolved on contact with reality.
The answer, I think, is that we talked ourselves, but not the voters, into believing. And I think the way the campaign was organized helped inflate and sustain that bubble of belief, right up to the moment that the voters arrived.

* * *

The moment for me, and I think for many of us, when we realized that Dean was sunk was on Wednesday after New Hampshire, when the press reported that he’d spent most of his $45 million war chest already. The obvious question, “How did he think he could do the rest of the campaign on a few million dollars?” has an obvious answer: “He thought he’d raise more, when Iowa and New Hampshire anointed him frontrunner.”
This was a fatal flaw in the campaign – they believed their own press. Dean was so out of touch that he had not prepared a concession speech in Iowa, a state where his third place finish was so bad that if he’d gotten every single Gephardt vote as well, he would still have been in third place, and would still have been double digits behind Kerry.
This is the question within the question. Out here, we had an excuse (albeit a flimsy one) for believing Dean was the frontrunner: it’s what we read in the papers. But campaigns don’t just use the pollsters, their field operations also keep their own numbers. And for Dean to blow all his cash and then not even prepare for anything other than victory means their internal numbers predicted certain victory as well.

The irony here is rich: Dean spent much of his campaign blasting Bush for relying on faulty intelligence to make decisions and for failing to plan ahead for postwar Iraq. Moreover, his party has hung a lot of importance on corporate scandals and the burst of the tech bubble, both of which were grounded in some way in wildly optimistic overestimates of profitability. And after all that, it turns out that Dean himself was the one who was guilty of the very things he charged the president with: he fell for bad information and didn’t have a contingency plan in place if things went badly.
Of course, there’s a counter to all this: that Dean’s implosion was all about Dean’s own statements piling up against him, while events outside his control (i.e., the capture of Saddam) worked to undercut the thrust of his case. And you can argue that, given what a longshot Dean was to start with, it made eminent sense for Dean to pursue a high-risk, no-fallback-position strategy aimed at crushing the opposition in the first two contests (in fact, John Kerry has succeeded by pursuing the same strategy). But the fact is, Dean believed his own BS, and he paid for it.

The Calendar

There’s been some griping from Democrats about the GOP having its convention in New York so close to the anniversary of September 11, when the incumbent party’s conventions are normally in mid-August, but a look at the calendar (thanks to The Note) explains why the Republicans are staging the convention so late:

July 26, 2004: Target start date for the 108th Congress’ August recess
July 26-29, 2004: Democratic National Convention, Boston
Aug. 14-29, 2004: Summer Olympic Games, Athens, Greece
Aug. 30-Sept. 2, 2004: Republican National Convention, New York City
Sept. 6, 2004: Labor Day
Sept. 7, 2004: Target end date for the 108th Congress’ August recess

As Bill Clinton might have told himself: it’s the Olympics, stupid.

Alabama Song

John Derbyshire has a typically politically incorrect poem that I couldn’t help but laugh at:

Laurie Lee done fell in love;
She planned to marry Joe.
She was so happy ’bout it all
She told her Pappy so.
Pappy told her, “Laurie gal,
You’ll have to find another.
I’d just as soon yer Ma don’t know,
But Joe is yer half brother”
So Laurie put aside her Joe
And planned to marry Will.
But after telling Pappy this,
He said, “There’s trouble still…
You cannot marry Will, my gal.,
And please don’t tell yer Mother,
But Will and Joe and several mo’
I know is yer half brother”
But Mama knew and said, “My child,
Just do what makes you happy.
Marry Will or marry Joe.
You ain’t no kin to Pappy.

Man of the People

After Ted Barlow accused Jonah Goldberg of printing made-up stories of John Kerry pulling rank on ordinary citizens (often with the question, “Do you know who I am?,” which Jonah now abbreviates as “DYKWIA”), Howie Carr stoked the fire with a NY Post column detailing how his callers have been lighting up the phone lines for years with stories like this. (For those of you unfamiliar with his work, Carr is a Boston Herald columnist and radio show host who’s somewhere between the slightly over-the-top Limbaugh and Hannity and the way-over-the-top likes of Ann Coulter or Bob Grant). Now, Barlow does have a point about using anonymous letter-writers and callers to slam public figures, but I strongly suspect that some serious reportage would uncover a heck of a lot of people willing to repeat this type of thing on the record.
Now, Goldberg points us to an amusing catch by brand-new blogger Donald Crankshaw, who noticed a DYKWIA-type story about Kerry from none other than Dave Barry:

In conclusion, I want to extend my sincere best wishes to all of my opponents, Republican and Democrat, and to state that, in the unlikely event I am not elected, I will support whoever is, even if it is Sen. John Kerry, who once came, with his entourage, into a ski-rental shop in Ketchum, Idaho, where I was waiting patiently with my family to rent snowboards, and Sen. Kerry used one of his lackeys to flagrantly barge in line ahead of us and everybody else, as if he had some urgent senatorial need for a snowboard, like there was about to be an emergency meeting, out on the slopes, of the Joint Halfpipe Committee. I say it’s time for us, as a nation, to put this unpleasant incident behind us. I know that I, for one, have forgotten all about it. That is how fair and balanced I am.

You can check out Barry’s whole column here. While it’s Barry’s usual tongue-in-cheek style, Crankshaw says he emailed Barry’s “Research Department” and Barry insists that he’s not making this one up.
Meanwhile, the Onion perfectly captures Kerry’s true colors (link via Andrew Sullivan).

It’s All One Problem

Tacitus has a great series of posts here, here and here on why we should wake up and realize that Hezbollah and other non-Al Qaeda jihadist terror groups are also at war with us. This is very close to the core of what I believe Bush understands, and his critics willfully misunderstand, about the war on terror, and why the fissures over Iraq are so deep. (Among other things, Saddam’s open support for suicide bombers in Israel and his known support for other terror groups – together with his invocation of the jihadist ideology in his public pronouncements – was, in my mind, a huge factor in why we were right to go to war with him). We simply can no longer tolerate the existence of groups like this. It’s all one problem, and there’s really no way to keep suicidal jihadist fanatics from following their anti-American creed to its logical conclusion.
While you’re over at Tacitus’ place, by the way, don’t miss his two-part series here and here on the history and aftermath of the Rwandan genocide, including some first-hand reporting from Tacitus’ trip to Rwanda late last year. It’s a heart-rending account of a story that I, for one, have never entirely gotten my mind around (the French don’t come off too well, although nobody else in the West does either), and is some of the best writing you are likely to see on any blog on any subject.