Paralysis

I’ve stressed before that I’m not that interested in pinning blame on Americans for the September 11 attacks; there’s way too much 20/20 hindsight out there. Nonetheless, it’s important to keep the historical record straight – not least as a reminder that those who want to return to the pre-September 11 policies are horrifically mistaken, and also as a curative against current agitprop that seeks to blame President Bush for the problem. In that light, it’s important to keep the Clinton legacy on terrorism in perspective and understand why, with the benefit of that hindsight, it was such a disaster.
Clinton likes to speak today of his “virtual obsession” with getting Osama bin Laden. Here’s his explanation of why he didn’t, from Larry King’s show on Sunday night:

And after the African embassies were blown up, there was a plan to blow up our embassy in Albania. We did that. There was a plan by many of bin Laden’s allies from the mujahideen in Afghanistan, the Afghan War, to take over Bosnia after the Bosnian War and we stopped that.
So we were deeply immersed in this. So what I say all the time is — and what I told President Bush when we had our little meeting after the Supreme Court decision — I regret deeply that I didn’t get him. I tried everything I knew to get him.
I wish — the only real regret I have in terms of our efforts is nearly everybody in the world knew that he did the USS Cole in October of 2000. I knew what our options were, I knew what our military options were, I knew what our covert options were. And I felt I couldn’t take strong military action against Afghanistan because the FBI and the CIA didn’t officially agree that bin Laden had done it until after I left office.
If they had done so when I was in office, I would have taken stronger action — even as a lame duck president.
KING: Do you know why they didn’t?
CLINTON: I think they just had a process they wanted to go through. And keep in mind, you know, when Oklahoma City happened, which before 9/11 was the worst domestic terrorist incident, a lot of people immediately jumped to the conclusion that it was a Muslim militant terrorist. And I remember standing in the Rose Garden of the White House pleading with the American people not to jump to any conclusions.
So I felt if I launched a full scale attack, violated air space of countries that wouldn’t give me permission, had to do the logistics of doing that without basing rights like we had in Uzbekistan and other things we had after 9/11, I would have been on grounds without an approval.
But I don’t think — I don’t know of anything that I could have done that I didn’t do at the time that would have dramatically increased the chances of getting bin Laden because I wanted to do it and I regretted not doing it.


There’s just a world of misguided caution there, and not just on Clinton’s part; the FBI and CIA bear some pretty substantial responsibility as well. But note that Clinton treated the Cole incident exactly as the current critics of the Iraq war would have treated Saddam Hussein: by giving bin Laden the benefit of every doubt, by treating it as a law enforcement matter requiring indictable evidence before one moves to protect the nation. The consequences of this approach, as we now know, were catastrophic.
Clinton’s approach was also problematic for a deeper reason: he spoke at the time and speaks now, as President Bush has wisely stopped doing, as if apprehending a single leader (bin Laden) was the goal, and as if military action was pointless if he didn’t apprehend the #1 guy. But we also know, as Clinton knew and told the nation as far back as August 1998, that Taliban Afghanistan was home to “a network of terrorist compounds near the Pakistani border that housed supporters of Saudi millionaire Osama bin Laden.” Of course, it was the men training in those camps, not bin Laden himself, who actually executed the September 11 plot, and thousands more trained there who may still be at large. In a January 1999 speech, Clinton reiterated the problem:

Since 1993, we have tripled funding for FBI anti-terrorist efforts. Our agents and prosecutors, with excellent support from our intelligence agencies, have done extraordinary work in tracking down perpetrators of terrorist acts and bringing them to justice. And as our air strikes against Afghanistan — or against the terrorist camps in Afghanistan — last summer showed, we are prepared to use military force against terrorists who harm our citizens. But all of you know the fight against terrorism is far from over. And now, terrorists seek new tools of destruction.
Last May, at the Naval Academy commencement, I said terrorist and outlaw states are extending the world’s fields of battle, from physical space to cyberspace, from our earth’s vast bodies of water to the complex workings of our own human bodies. The enemies of peace realize they cannot defeat us with traditional military means. So they are working on two new forms of assault, which you’ve heard about today: cyber attacks on our critical computer systems, and attacks with weapons of mass destruction — chemical, biological, potentially even nuclear weapons. We must be ready — ready if our adversaries try to use computers to disable power grids, banking, communications and transportation networks, police, fire and health services — or military assets.


Indeed, even ordinary internet users knew about the terrorist training camps in Afghanistan during the last two and a half years of the Clinton Administration.
Richard Miniter has taken a dark view of Clinton’s efforts:

[S]tarting in 1993, Rep. Bill McCollum (R., Fla.) repeatedly wrote to President Clinton and warned him and other administration officials about bin Laden and other Islamic terrorists. McCollum was the founder and chairman of the House Taskforce on Terrorism and Unconventional Warfare and had developed a wealth of contacts among the mujihedeen in Afghanistan. Those sources, who regularly visited McCollum, informed him about bin Laden’s training camps and evil ambitions.


[snip]

In October 2000, al Qaeda bombed the USS Cole in Aden, Yemen. Seventeen sailors were killed in the blast. The USS Cole was almost sunk. In any ordinary administration, this would have been considered an act of war. After all, America entered the Spanish-American war and World War I when our ships were attacked.
Counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke had ordered his staff to review existing intelligence in relation to the bombing of the USS Cole. After that review, he and Michael Sheehan, the State Department’s counterterrorism coordinator, were convinced it was the work of Osama bin Laden. The Pentagon had on-the-shelf, regularly updated and detailed strike plans for bin Laden’s training camps and strongholds in Afghanistan.
At a meeting with Secretary of Defense William Cohen, Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, Attorney General Janet Reno, and other staffers, Clarke was the only one in favor of retaliation against bin Laden. Reno thought retaliation might violate international law and was therefore against it. Tenet wanted to more definitive proof that bin Laden was behind the attack, although he personally thought he was. Albright was concerned about the reaction of world opinion to a retaliation against Muslims, and the impact it would have in the final days of the Clinton Middle East peace process. Cohen, according to Clarke, did not consider the Cole attack “sufficient provocation” for a military retaliation. Michael Sheehan was particularly surprised that the Pentagon did not want to act. He told Clarke: “What’s it going to take to get them to hit al Qaeda in Afghanistan? Does al Qaeda have to attack the Pentagon?”
Instead of destroying bin Laden’s terrorist infrastructure and capabilities, President Clinton phoned twice phoned the president of Yemen demanding better cooperation between the FBI and the Yemeni security services. If Clarke’s plan had been implemented, al Qaeda’s infrastructure would have been demolished and bin Laden might well have been killed. Sept. 11, 2001 might have been just another sunny day.


Rich Lowry:

[W]hy attack just one Afghan training camp? Mike Rolince, former chief of the international terrorism division of the FBI, explained to me: “We never went back to the camps and dismantled the neighborhood where these people were allowed to train, test chemicals, recruit, plan operations. On a regular basis, we saw intelligence that documented what they were, where they were, how big they were, how many people were going through there, and the administration lacked the political will to go in there and do something about it.”


Now, Clinton’s failure to act is sometimes excused by other circumstances: impeachment distracted him, he had to prosecute the Kosovo war, he couldn’t act during an election. Let’s go to the timeline of Clinton’s military responses against al Qaeda or, for that matter, against Iraq, charted against a selection (admittedly incomplete) of significant events:

Month Events Military Actions
August 1998 August 7: Embassy bombings. August 17: Clinton grand jury testimony August 20: Missile strikes on terror camps in Afghanistan
September 1998 September 11: Starr Report released None
October 1998 n/a None
November 1998 Congressional elections None
December 1998 December 19: Clinton impeached December 16: Desert Fox (bombing of sites in Iraq)
January 1999 n/a None
February 1999 February 12: Senate acquits Clinton None
March 1999 March 24: Bombing in Kosovo begins None
April 1999 Kosovo campaign continues None
May 1999 Kosovo campaign continues None
June 1999 June 10: Kosovo campaign ends None
July 1999 n/a None
August 1999 n/a None
September 1999 n/a None
October 1999 n/a None
November 1999 n/a None
December 1999 n/a None
January 2000 n/a None
February 2000 n/a None
March 2000 March 7: Bush, Gore lock up nominations; stock market begins long slide None
April 2000 n/a None
May 2000 n/a None
June 2000 n/a None
July 2000 Republican Convention None
August 2000 Democratic Convention None
September 2000 n/a None
October 2000 October 12: Cole bombing; October 11: second Bush-Gore debate, candidates discuss Iraq but neither addresses terrorism None
November 2000 Election, recount begins None
December 2000 December 12: Supreme Court stops recount None
January 2001 January 20: Clinton leaves office amid flurry of presidential pardons and new regulations None

Again, the purpose of the timeline isn’t to damn Clinton (although one does come away with the conclusion that his military aggressiveness tended to wane when he wasn’t in extreme political/legal peril, and question what he could have been doing instead of spending “a whole day a week every week for a year, maybe a little more” in marriage counseling), but to point out the obvious: for more than three years after the August 1998 attacks, the nation and its president (Clinton, for most of that period) knew there were terrorist camps operating in Afghanistan, and failed to treat them as a lethal threat. In the latter half of 1999 in particular, it seems difficult to explain why an offensive against terrorists could not have been a higher priority. Let us not repeat that error.

Following Freddy

Baseball teams tend to be unfortunately half-hearted in cutting bait on hopes of contention at times – consider Arizona’s decision to retain Randy Johnson and Luis Gonzalez and Steve Finley even after the departure of Curt Schilling set them firmly on the rebuilding track – so we can’t read too much into the Mariners unloading free agent-to-be Freddy Garcia. Still, with the aging Mariners in last place 10.5 games behind their nearest competitor, it’s interesting to look at what’s left. Leaving aside the rather pointless catcher swap of Ben Davis for Miguel Olivo, the primary bounty from the deal was Jeremy Reed, a high-average hitting outfielder (the Mariners also got minor league SS Michael Morse). The logical next steps would be dealing Jamie Moyer, Eddie Guardado, Mike Myers, and John Olerud (although Olerud’s fine .374 OBP isn’t really enough to deserve a starting job on a contender for a 1B who’s slow and has no power).
UPDATE: Derek Zumsteg and friends at the USS Mariner are pretty pumped about the deal, partly in light of having watched Garcia’s struggles in recent years; start here and scroll down. Unsurprisingly, David Cameron doesn’t think Jamie Moyer’s going anywhere. More interesting is whether some contender with a hole to fill will take a flyer on Bret Boone. Gee, I wonder who has money to burn and Miguel Cairo playing second base?

Lost Sunday

Not much to say about the first game Sunday, as Yankee longballs gave Jose Contreras’ storybook reunion with his family all the help he needed. The second game was much more frustrating, since the Mets did a number of good things, including some massive home runs (Richard Hidalgo going deep to dead center, Eric Valent blasting an upper-deck job to right), and good pitching (like John Franco striking out the side in the eighth). But the hole Matt Ginter got into with some first inning dribblers and a hit batsman (Jeter) leading up to Ruben Sierra’s 2-run shot was just too much.
Leiter and Glavine may be able to handle the likes of the Yankee lineup, but I’m doubtful as to the rest of the staff.
Oh, and Mike Stanton still sucks.

You’re So Conventional

Drezner quotes Andrew Sullivan knocking the conventions:

For my part, I think bloggers could make more of a statement by not going to these elaborate infomercials. All they are are schmooze-fests for journalists, pundits and political types and then many layers of corrupting parties for donors. The only political importance is as television shows, and you can better understand that by, er, watching television.


A major cliche award should go to anybody who carps about the fact that conventions are contrived for TV. The whole point of the modern political convention is to allow a once-every-four-years opportunity for each of our two major political parties to speak directly to the public – without much in the way of media filtering – about their agenda and vision for the nation. The parties make some delberate choices about the face they choose to show to the public, and those choices, as in the 1992 GOP convention or Al Gore’s 2000 speech, can be significant. And there are still the genuine human moments that crop up in any live TV event, no matter how stage-managed, like the electricity generated by the Ted Kennedy 1980 and Reagan 1976 not-entirely-a-concession speeches.
So count me as a dissenter against the cynics. Yes, conventions are scripted for TV. But that’s precisely why they matter.

Ryan Ryan & Ryan

One of Drezner’s readers has a good point here about GOP Senate candidate Jack Ryan:

[A]s a Chicagoan let me just mention how depressing it is to have the most clueless, lunkheaded republican party in the country. Worst of all they cant seem to find a candidate for any office not named Ryan (former Governor George Ryan was plagued with graft and corruption). Newsflash GOP, many voters dont bother to see what a guys first name is, if a Ryan keeps showing up on ballots every couple of years, a significant number of semi-apathetic voters will check the opposite column just out of habit. Idiots.


You’ll recall this problem biting GOP gubernatorial candidate Jim Ryan in 2002. (Not that I’m endorsing the characterization of the IL GOP as the most clueless in the nation; MA, NJ & CA all provide stiff competition). Why not double down and bring in the Express?

Al Gore Calls Me A Nazi

There he goes again: Al Gore serves up a steaming dollop of leftist tropes on how people were misled about the Iraq-Al Qaeda connection, based on the usual Gore assumption that the American people are too stupid to understand what the Administration actually says. Then, he rails against the Bush Administration getting support from a “network of ‘rapid response’ digital Brown Shirts who work to pressure reporters and their editors for ‘undermining support for our troops.'”
I guess he means us warbloggers, eh?
Powerline, as usual, has, well, a rapid response and an appropriate one, including some amusing Gore quotes from 12 years ago, back when he was still a responsible adult.
More ugliness:

Continue reading Al Gore Calls Me A Nazi

Greetings from Crawford

Lawroark (via Andrew Sullivan) takes apart Michael Moore for dredging up a silly Dana Milbank article from the September 3, 2002 Washington Post saying that President Bush had spent 42% of his term on vacation. Lawroark notes a couple problems with this, including the inclusion of weekends in the figure, and has a nifty photo display of Bush meeting with foreign heads of state at the ranch and Camp David, which hardly seems like a day at the beach to me.
Let’s add two more problems with this line of attack:
1. The proportion of the president’s term spent on vacation will always be highest if measured at the beginning of September, and higher still if it includes two whole summers in office and only one winter. Entering September 2002, the months of June, July and August accounted for 6 of the 19 months of the Bush presidency (31.5%). Does this mean Bush only likes being president in the summertime? Or did Milbank, on a slow newsday, just pick a fortuitous time to run the numbers?
2. As President Clinton told Newsweek three years ago (I don’t have the link but the quote is reprinted here), and repeats the point in his memoirs: “Every important mistake I made in my life, I made because I was too tired.” Bush understands that executive decisions require judgment, and judgment requires a clear head; if he needs to go jogging, get to bed early or clear brush on his ranch to think things through, that’s a far better management strategy than staying up all night eating pizza and getting frisky with interns.

Beltran Goes South

Well, for all you fans of the Mets – or anybody else – hoping to land Carlos Beltran, the jig is up as Beltran goes to the Astros, in a three-way deal that explains a lot about Houston’s willingness to donate Richard Hidalgo to the Mets for David Weathers. With a strong team, a tough division and heavy reliance on oldsters like Clemens and Bagwell, the Astros are definitely in go-for-broke mode, so acquiring Beltran is a worthwhile gamble.
What Houston gave up, though, will cost them: Octavio Dotel. This presumably makes Brad Lidge the closer, but leaves the team short in the pen (not that this is an unacceptable cost for a big star like Beltran). Dotel had some off days this year, mainly due to the longball, but he should greatly improve the closer-less bullpen in Oakland, which can now move Arthur Rhodes back to the setup role. Kudos to Billy Beane on weaseling his way into another three-way swap. He even managed to wheedle some cash out of the poor-mouthing Royals. Wanna bet Beane’s not done yet?
As for KC, giving up on this season had come to make sense, even though this team looked before the season like a legit contender. They got three prospects from Houston and Oakland: third baseman Mark Teahen and right-hander Mike Wood from Oakland, and catcher Joe or John Buck (sources seem unclear on this; if it’s Joe, he has a colorful history of broadcasting and prostitution behind him) from the Astros. I checked the Baseball Prospectus and they had unimpressive numbers for Buck and Wood and nothing on Teahan, but I’m sure we’ll see commentary soon enough from some of the experts on minor leaguers.

Going Hard on the Mullahs

David Warren thinks the rising nuclear threat presented by the repressive theocarcy in Iran is so grave that Bush should launch military strikes, even if it costs him the election. Via Bill Hobbs, who agrees but thinks Bush’s electoral prospects wouldn’t be harmed. I’m highly sympathetic to the idea of using air power to take out Iran’s nuclear capacity and using covery operations to speed the overthrow the Iranian government by pro-Western democratic reformers. I’m less certain that we’ve quite reached the right moment for either, but I would certainly hope that the Administration is considering the question closely, election or no election.
Of course, given Iran’s vast size and our commitments in Iraq, Afghanistan and Korea, there’s no way we’d be able to provide nation-building security support in Iran. But then, democracies broke out all over the place in the late 80s and early 90s without American hand-holding, in many cases in countries ravaged by Communism. In Iran, there’s no possibility of getting a worse government than the current one, so the only real risks would be (1) total destabilization of the place and (2) we better be damn sure we hit all the nuclear sites. Those are real risks. But nuclear weapons in the hands of the sponsors of Hezbollah is a prospect too frightening to contemplate.
Like the man says: faster, please.

It’s Bill’s World

If you haven’t noticed, ESPN has now launched a separate site for Bill Simmons’ columns (Page 2 1/2?); make sure to add it to your bookmarks. At the moment, it’s just a page of columns, although there may be additional bells and whistles on the way, and Bill has plenty of stuff there now on the latest doings in the NBA. I doubt that Bill could re-create all the features of the old BSG site on a national platform even if he wanted to (the ones he wrote, that is, not that I’d exactly be adverse to contributing the occasional baseball column for old times’ sake), but it will be interesting to see what else he and the ESPN team can come up with now that he’s back to sportswriting full time.
(On the other hand, much as I like Bill, I personally wouldn’t compare him to Einstein and Michael Jordan).

Not Clinton

Will Saletan pens a transparently fatuous article seeking to compare Illinois Senate candidate Jack Ryan to Bill Clinton so as to level a ludicrous accusation of hypocrisy against Republicans:

Six years ago, Republicans demanded that Bill Clinton be investigated and impeached for having sex with an intern and covering it up. Now their nominee for the U.S. Senate in Illinois, Jack Ryan, is brushing off his then-wife’s allegations that he repeatedly pressured her, despite her protestations, to have sex with him in front of other people. Instead of denouncing Ryan, many Republicans are defending him.


Saletan concludes: “Now we know why Bill Clinton got impeached. He was in the wrong club.” No serious adult could believe that the GOP’s defense of Ryan shows “why Bill Clinton got impeached,” and I very seriously doubt that Saletan expects anyone to believe this column. Note that Saletan doesn’t even bother to deal with the inconvenient facts about Clinton, none of which are involved here:
1. He was the President; character is more central with an executive than a legislator, and particularly the president;
2. He was cheating on his wife;
3. With a star-struck and emotionally vulnerable woman half his age;
4. Who was a subordinate and, later, a federal employee;
5. In the office during the workday;
6. He lied about it under oath;
7. He conspired with others to do the same, including hiding evidence and offering favors to those who agreed to keep quiet;
8. He involved other federal officials in lying to the public about it;
9. He had an extremely long history of sexual infidelity, including numerous charges, some of them quite credible, that Clinton had essentially forced himself on unwilling women.
Ryan, by contrast, comes off only as a bad and boorish husband with freaky sexual interests – not a recommendation of his candidacy but hardly fatal to being a U.S. Senator (heck, John Kerry left his first wife while she was battling suicidal depression to run for the Senate). [CORRECTION: Kerry left his wife because he was concerned that she would distract him from running for Lieutenant Governor, not the Senate]. Only in the fantasies of Clinton’s defenders is that all there was to the Lewinsky saga. I suppose Saletan is trying to bait us conservatives into rehashing all this to make us sound obsessed with Clinton, and if that’s his intent, I just fell for it. But really, nobody could believe Saletan’s Clinton analogy here in good faith.

No Mahdi

The good news from the Washington Times’ account of the 1st Armored Division’s defeat of Muqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army (link via Sullivan): “The division estimates it killed at least several thousand militia members” out of an estimated 10,000 strong militia. I’m less disappointed in letting Sadr go if we killed so many of his men, since that makes it much harded for him to rebuild a power base. I’m hopeful that Sadr will be dealt with eventually, just not by us. The important thing is, he was defeated and by this point, everybody knows it.

I Did That. That’s My Fault

It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that last night’s Mets loss was Kaz Matsui’s fault. First and third, one out in the bottom of the ninth – after a hustling Todd Zeile went first-to-third on a Jason Phillips single – and Matsui, after running the count to 3-1, strikes out diving at a pitch that was way low and outside. The Mets wouldn’t get another chance as good to win the game.
As the Mets announcers were pointing out, the team was also in the unusual position where they regretted sending home today’s starting pitcher (Tom Glavine) early – because they needed him as a pinch hitter in extra innings, and instead had to send up Steve Trachsel.

Link Roundup 6/23/04

*The MinuteMan rips Paul Krugman for criticizing John Ashcroft for not holding a press conference on the arrest of a domestic terrorist. Of course, if you missed it, Michelle Malkin did a good number on Krugman’s last fact-challenged foray into smearing Ashcroft. (via Instapundit)
*PJ O’Rourke (via Kaus) rehashes parts of his 1986 essay “Goons, Guns & Gold” in which he goes after John Kerry for being spineless (or, as O’Rourke wrote in his notes at the time, “ball-less” – even Joe Conason comes out looking like a hero compared to Kerry.) Not that Richard Lugar fares well either, and I suppose you can argue that Kerry’s unwillingness to get involved showed a nuanced appreciation for the diplomatic complexities, but it’s still a rather ugly incident.
*An amusing conversation between Pat Buchanan and Ralph Nader. They agree more than they disagree.

The Man Who Came To Dinner

I wonder about the effect of Bill Clinton’s listen-to-me tour on the Kerry campaign. Of course, the effect of such things tends to be minimal either way, but . . . Reagan’s death was a mixed bag for Bush: Bush clearly stands for many of the same things Reagan did, has endured many of the same criticisms from the same sources, and shares some of Reagan’s strengths. On the other hand, especially when it comes to his wit and persuasive powers as well as substantive issues like battling government spending, Bush is clearly no Reagan.
But Clinton doesn’t even hold such mixed blessings for Kerry, because Kerry shares few of Clinton’s virtues (his charm and charisma, his willingness to take on elements of his party, his ability to tap into the nation’s innate optimism) and has different liabilities (his positions are both more liberal and less distinct than Clinton’s, plus Clinton was never accused of being an aloof, out-off-touch elitist). You can draw parallels between Clinton and Kerry, to be sure, but you have to work so hard at it that you aren’t likely to convince anyone but the choir.
Plenty of Clinton stuff out there, if you care to read it. Kathryn Jean Lopez notes that Clinton’s 957-page opus ignores his own signing of the Defense of Marriage Act. Blackfive has a humorous anecdote and some more pointed observations. Favorite line: “Dan Rather looked like he was taking the hottest girl to the prom…”
Anyway, I’ve still got serious Clinton fatigue; I’m working on one or two posts but I’m not going to spend a lot of time on all this.

Workhorses

One quick Mets thought: not only are Tom Glavine (2.07), Al Leiter (2.14), Braden Looper (1.83), Matt Ginter (2.79), Orber Moreno (3.20) and Ricky Bottalico (2.01) all pitching thus far to career-best ERAs, but through 68 games, several Mets pitchers are on pace for career highs in innings pitched, including Glavine (249), Steve Trachsel (218), Looper (93), Ginter (92), and Mike Stanton (85). We’ll see how they all hold up.

Really, You Don’t Want To

Dr. Weevil notes that there was at least one example of someone trying to cross the Berlin Wall in the other direction:

In the late ’70s or early ’80s The American Spectator reported that a young West German had tried repeatedly to do just that. After apprehending him for the 8th or 18th time (details are a little fuzzy now), the East German authorities demanded that the West German authorities put him in a mental hospital. It was, as TAS noted with cheerful contempt, a very revealing demand.

Paying Dividends

A DC-based lobbying outfit called the American Shareholders Association has produced a study showing a sharp increase in payment of dividends following the dividend tax cut:

According to the latest ASA analysis of S&P 500 dividend data, favorable dividend activity among S&P 500 companies increased 55.2 percent since the tax cut was enacted. A total of 298 favorable dividend actions (increases and initiations) were taken on the S&P 500 compared to just 192 in the previous 12 month period. 19 more companies are paying a dividend than before the tax cut and companies increased their dividend 277 times. As a result, $185 billion of cash will be returned to S&P 500 shareholders in 2004.


The group’s head argues that this is good corporate governance, given that unlike reported earnings, cash dividends can’t be faked:

“More cash in shareholders pockets is disciplining managers to undertake only the most productive investments. This has re-elevated shareholders to be true owners of the corporations they invest in and has improved corporate governance more than any regulation passed by Congress or the Securities and Exchange Commission.”

Quotes of the Week

David Weathers, on being traded to Houston:

David Weathers said one of the toughest parts of getting dealt to Houston was telling his 4 1/2-year-old son Ryan, who is a fixture in the New York clubhouse.
“He was crushed,” Weathers said. “He told me, ‘you can be an Astro. I’m gonna be a Met.’ And then he didn’t come out of his room for almost an hour.”


Richard Hidalgo, on rumors (prior to the deal being finalized) of his being traded to the Mets:

“I don’t think about it,” he said of the trade talks. “They’re the ones thinking about it (in New York). I don’t have anything to say about that, but New York doesn’t scare me. I’ve played in Venezuela.”

Hidalgo Gold

All trades involve a certain amount of risk; you just have to weigh the upside against the downside and the cost and compare that to doing nothing. And the Mets’ trade of David Weathers and B-grade pitching prospect Jeremy Griffiths for Astros outfielder Richard Hidalgo looks like a great gamble:
1. Weathers is 34; Hidalgo is 28. So, you can’t view this as compromising the future for a win-now posture.
2. Hidalgo has just one year left on his contract, which the Mets can buy out for $2 million:

As Duquette was quick to point out, if Hidalgo has any future with the Mets beyond 2004, it won’t come with that hefty price tag. “It wouldn’t preclude us from renegotiating if he played well here and liked it here,” Duquette said. “We’ll keep an open mind to it.”


So, this isn’t a deal that ties the Mets’ hands much beyond this season.
3. Weathers has been terrible (see this analysis from Avkash at the Raindrops, which I linked to last week).
4. Even when you factor in that he’s leaving Minute Maid Field, Hidalgo’s a guy who can put up some serious power numbers. Hidalgo had a huge year last year, slugging .572 in more than 500 at bats, and started this season like a house afire before sliding into a slump at the end of April that he hasn’t shaken yet. Here’s his numbers for 2003-04:

Dates G AB H 2B 3B HR R RBI BB K AVG SLG OBP OPS
2003-4/24/04 158 580 184 52 3 32 104 107 62 119 .317 .583 .383 966
4/25-6/16/04 41 133 26 6 1 0 8 11 13 38 .195 .256 .267 523

Now, that is indeed one horrendous slump, and if you’re Houston and paying Hidalgo $12 million, it looks twice as bad. But in a lot of ways, Houston’s decision to drop Hidalgo after a bad six weeks looks suspiciously like the White Sox’ abandonment of D’Angelo Jimenez this time last season in the midst of a similar slump; I questioned that move at the time here and showed how badly it worked out here. It’s possible that something’s seriously wrong with Hidalgo that was fine in April (he has been battling some shoulder problems lately), but if this is just a slump, the Astros could really regret dealing him. Recall that Baseball Prospectus had Hidalgo projected for this season at .278/.498/.358, and thought he would probably exceed that (the Established Win Shares method lists him as a 15 Win Shares player entering this year, which is quite solid).
I’ll take this bet any day.

The Weathervane

Over at the Command Post I note John Kerry’s latest broadside against the idea that the Iraq war is part of the war on terror, and contrast it with what he said back in 2002 when he voted to authorize the war. It’s Kerry’s clearest statement yet that he simply wants no part of the current strategy in the war on terror – viewing the problem as one arising from the nature of the whole Middle East and requiring a regional solution – but sees the war as just Afghanistan and some parts of Pakistan where Al Qaeda remains in concentrated hiding.
John McCain, by stark contrast, has not gone wobbly at all; in this New Republic article (subscription only), despite some criticisms for how the Bush Administration handled the pre- and post-war situation in Iraq, McCain expresses no reservations about the decision to go to war based on the information we had at the time (or on what we know now), and makes clear that he buys in completely to the “neocon” vision of the war’s overall strategy:

Added to th[e humanitarian] justification for war were the potential benefits to the region–the ripple effects that a free and democratic Iraqi state can still have on the Middle East. Naysayers have accused hawks of playing dice with people’s lives: How could we possibly know that a democratic Iraq would have a demonstration effect on the region? On one level, they are correct; we cannot know. But we did know what would happen if we didn’t try. The ossified situation in the Middle East, with its utter lack of political freedom or economic opportunity for millions of men and women, helps breed murderous ideologies that threaten the United States. And the region’s autocratic but pro-American regimes are increasingly incapable of stifling these deadly, anti-Western tendencies in their own people. The Saudi regime pledges its love and respect for the United States, yet 15 of 19 September 11 hijackers were Saudi. Establishing a democratic Iraq in the heart of the region was, and remains, our best chance for encouraging the necessary transformation of the Middle East. Already, the effects of Iraq are being felt: A major reform conference recently took place in Alexandria, Egypt, and the Arab League has endorsed a reform agenda.
So, in the end, we had essentially three choices–deal with Saddam early, while we could; deal with Saddam later, after sanctions had lost force, he had resuscitated his weapons programs, and more Iraqis had lost their lives; or simply sit back and hope for the best. We were right to act. And we have paid a high price for our noble ambitions–over 800 Americans dead, well over $100 billion and counting spent on the war, disgrace at Abu Ghraib. But, when I stood in August at the mass grave at Hilla, where 10,000 Iraqis were executed–some tied together and shot so as to save bullets–I did not wish to take it all back. We believed we would be greeted as liberators, and in many places we have been–not everywhere, to be sure, but, during my visit to the country, there was widespread thanks for the coalition.


Count me with McCain on this one. We know where he stands. The best you can say about Kerry’s position is that it’s subject to change.

What He Said

The MinuteMan weighs in with some thoughts on criticizing non-blogging, and notes that he was way ahead of me, back in 2002, with more examples of Mark Kleiman’s demonization of things not written by right-leaning bloggers, including this howler:

Aside from Andrew Sullivan, who doesn’t like gay-baiting no matter who does it (but seems ok with other forms of prejudice), I have yet to see anyone in the right blogosphere object to the persistent use of bigotry and other dirty tricks by Republican candidates. This is in fairly sharp contrast to the practices of the left blogosphere, and seems to me to reflect a real difference between liberals and conservatives in terms of willingness to criticize their own side.
…I think the difference is a legitimate source of pride: to be liberal is, fundamentally, to be fair-minded.


(To be fair, this was before the Trent Lott brewhaha).

The High Hard One

I’m really looking forward to the new Neyer/Bill James book on pitchers; ESPN had an excerpt the other day that’s worth a few arguments on the best fastballs of all time (link via Baseball Primer).
Looking at Rob Neyer’s overall list of the best fastballs, I might rate Robin Roberts – who was the best pitcher in baseball for several years throwing nearly nothing but fastballs – ahead of Clemens, even though Clemens in his early-90s prime was a better pitcher (he’s not so shabby today, of course, but since 1996 or so the heater really hasn’t been his strikeout pitch).
Personally, I’d say the two best fastballs I’ve ever seen in my lifetime – on their own merits, as opposed to how they set them up with other pitches – are Mariano Rivera’s cut fastball and Dwight Gooden’s heater in his prime. Gooden’s high riser was a classic “oh, that’s just not fair” pitch even when the hitter was looking for it, let alone when he set it up with the big arching curveball. (Of course, Nolan Ryan’s fastball was plenty intimidating, but Ryan was also quite wild at his peak). Gossage isn’t far behind, though.

Not So Easy

Some interesting Kerry stuff from Robert Sam Anson in the NY Observer last week – I can’t find it online anymore – including Nixon privately calling Kerry “sort of a phony” on tape and a list of some of the daughters of fame and privilege Kerry has dated; I had forgotten that he dated Reagan’s daughter.
Near the end, though, Anson says that this is an election “between a man who knows life’s sorrows too well and agonizes too much, and a man who knows doubt, worry, reflection or serious hurt barely at all.” You hear this sometimes about Bush, but it conveniently forgets one of the formative, and undoubtedly shattering, experiences in Bush’s life – the death of his younger sister from leukemia when he was about 7 years old and she was 3 or 4. You really can’t overstate the impact a thing like that that has on a kid that age, but because the Bushes don’t dwell on it, Bush is seen as a guy who’s never suffered.
Moreover, painting Bush as a guy who’s immune to reflection ignores his decision to quit drinking, which is a fairly prime example of a man engaging in serious reflection and changing the course of his own life. Certainly you’d be hard pressed to find anything in Kerry’s life over the past 30 years (i.e., since the end of his Vietnam protest days) that bespeaks a similar effort to take stock and really reorient himself. Perhaps the portrait of Bush could use some (gasp) nuance.
UPDATE: Dr. Manhattan, in the comments, points me to the link.

Not On Message

Kos, on a plan to change Republican-leaning Colorado from winner-take-all to a proportional division of electoral votes: “The move is brilliant. For one, every state should allocate EVs in this manner. . . ”
One of Kos’ contributors, on a plan to do the same in California: “republican ploy in california to steal pres. election”
My own reaction is that I’m not in favor of changing the rules this far into the electoral season, much as overturning Kerry’s likely lock on California might be a tempting target. Long term, proportional division of state electoral votes might make sense except for two facts:
1. Small states with 3 or 4 electoral votes are harder to carve up in a fair proportion because of rounding issues;
2. As the Sultan of Snark notes, trying to fix this by tying it to congressional districts would only exacerbate the malign influence of gerrymandering.

The Fat Cat

Chris Suellentrop argues that Garfield has, since its inception, been basically a cynical merchandising concept in search of a comic strip. Personally – and maybe it’s just because I was 10, 12 years old at the time – I thought Garfield was a genuinely funny strip the first few years (especially the very early strips when Garfield was squarer and poorly drawn), granting that it jumped the shark some 20+ years ago.

You Will Write What I Tell You To Write

Is there any blogger out there who makes more demands of other bloggers than Mark Kleiman? I should preface this by saying that I generally don’t get into flame wars and the like with other bloggers; life’s too short, and I generally prefer just to bicker with a particular post and leave it at that (although the disappearance of Hesiod from the blogosphere does warm my heart). But Kleiman’s tactics and rhetoric have really gotten under my skin one time too many. Kleiman’s beloved rhetorical hobbyhorse is branding as many people on the Right as he can – other bloggers as well as pundits and elected officials – as bigots, liars, and crooks, often by association. He’s probably the single blogger most obsessed with a tactic we all use sometimes – and properly so, in some circumstances – but should be extremely cautious about overusing, especially against fellow amateur pundits who don’t have the time to cover every issue under the sun: demanding that people on the other side of the spectrum denounce this person or that activity or the other statement. And, of course, his hair-trigger overreactions even on subjects about which he knows little or nothing often winds up forcing him to back down from things he’s written.
It would, of course, be unfair of me to make such sweeping assertions about Kleiman’s blog without some examples. This is hardly exhaustive; we’ll go in reverse chronological order here:
June 13, 2004
Kleiman rips Eugene Volokh and Glenn Reynolds for not writing about the torture-memo issue, in response to Volokh’s reasoned explanation of why he was staying out of this controversy. Kleiman:

If the attacks on the Presdient were even a little bit unfair, one would have expected that, even if Eugene decided to remain silent, one of the less weighty conservative law-bloggers could have been found to rise to the President’s defense. (Glenn Reynolds, who has been silent so far this round, presumably isn’t available, given his unprintable response last time the torture issue came up.)
Sometimes silence conveys more information than speech. Indeed, as Leo Strauss never tired of reminding his readers, sometimes silence is intended to convey information about which speech would be inconvenient, or information too important to be written or spoken. This may be one of those cases.


June 4, 2004
Kleiman tries to smear the entire universe of people criticizing George Soros’ overwrought anti-Bush broadsides (like comparing Bush to Hitler) as nothing but disguised anti-Semitism:

Ever since the Republicans started their attempt to demonize George Soros, I’ve had in the back of my mind a nagging question about how much of the campaign was based on simple anti-Semitism.


Rather than ask himself whether Democrats would tear into a billionaire who was financing over-the-top attack ads on their president (Richard Mellon Scaife, anyone?), Kleiman latches on to a legitimately anti-Semitic Tony Blankley column in the Washington Times, but then uses it as a club to smear the rest of the Right while demanding that we all snap to attention; after Pejman weighed in, Kleiman wrote, “I’m still waiting for a non-Jewish conservative to agree, or a hint of complaint from the RNC or its allies”; after Drezner did the same, he insisted, “Drezner also doubts that Blankley’s words reflect discredit on the other Republican Soros-bashers. I’m with Kevin Drum on this one: yes they do, unless the other Republican Soros-bashers distance themselves from their colleague.” Frankly, I doubt that I’ve ever read a Tony Blankley column in my life, but there you have it: I’m a bigot because I didn’t denounce it the way Mark Kleiman demands. And if you’ve criticized Soros, even if you’ve never read anything Blankley has ever written, so are you.

Continue reading You Will Write What I Tell You To Write

Wiley Passes On

ESPN reports the sudden death of Ralph Wiley, the Page 2 columnist and former regular on the Sports Reporters. Wow. Wiley was 52 and in apparent good health, and his heart just gave out on him. One bit of trivia I didn’t know: Wiley coined the term “Billy Ball” for Billy Martin’s hustling 1980 A’s. Regular readers will recall that I’ve been no fan of Wiley, although he and Bill Simmons had played off each other quite well in some recent joint efforts, including a chat room session just last week. Say this much: Wiley won’t be easily replaced or replicated.

Slicing The Pie

OK, I’ve been on something of a Win Shares kick lately, playing around with the latest data. Here’s something else I came up with from looking at The Hardball Times’ tables of in-season 2004 Win Shares: the players who are contributing the greatest share of their teams’ Win Shares (through Thursday’s action). I broke the list between contending and non-contending teams (using .500, for now, as the break, since a team under .500 can’t contend unless they improve), and, due to the DH, between AL and NL. I also used un-rounded Win Shares rather than the rounded-off numbers, since it’s still early enough in the season that the rounding makes a significant impact. So, who’s carrying the biggest load for their team?
NL Contenders:

# Player Win Shares Team Team Wins %
1 Barry Bonds 20.1 SF 30 22.3
2 Sean Casey 19.6 CIN 34 19.2
3 Scott Rolen 18.1 STL 34 17.8
4 Bobby Abreu 15.8 PHI 30 17.6
5 Ken Griffey 15.3 CIN 34 15.3
6 Adam Dunn 14.6 CIN 34 14.6
7 Johnny Estrada 12.2 ATL 29 14.0
8 Lance Berkman 13.2 HOU 32 13.8
9 Mike Lowell 13.7 FLA 34 13.2
10 Albert Pujols 13.2 STL 34 12.9

Bonds, as always, dominates these lists . . . You can certainly see that the Reds are heavily dependent on three players for nearly half the team’s value, two of whom have underachieved in recent years and the third of whom has been injury prone. Fingers crossed . . . Johnny Estrada? . . . .
AL Contenders:

# Player Win Shares Team Team Wins %
1 Vladimir Guerrero 13.6 ANA 34 13.3
2 Michael Young 12.2 TEX 33 12.3
3 Manny Ramirez 12.0 BOS 35 11.4
4 Alex Rodriguez 12.7 NYY 38 11.1
5 Jose Guillen 10.5 ANA 34 10.3
6 Frank Thomas 9.1 CHW 31 9.8
7 Lew Ford 9.5 MIN 33 9.6
8 Curt Schilling 9.8 BOS 35 9.3
9T Tim Hudson 9.3 OAK 34 9.1
9T Scott Hatteberg 9.3 OAK 34 9.1

No surprise that Guerrero tops this list . . . As with the NL leaders, there are still some pretenders here (Lew Ford, Hatteberg). There are also fewer winning teams in the AL to pick from. In general, AL teams are less dependent on their stars at this stage, partly due to the concentration of stars on the Yankees.
NL Non-Contenders:

# Player Win Shares Team Team Wins %
1 Craig Wilson 11.8 PIT 24 16.4
2 Todd Helton 8.8 COL 21 14.0
3 Randy Johnson 9.9 AZ 24 13.8
4 Luis Gonzalez 9.8 AZ 24 13.6
5 Jack Wilson 9.5 PIT 24 13.2

Like some of the NL leaders, a few of the bad teams are also top-heavy with a few decent contributors.
AL Non-Contenders:

# Player Win Shares Team Team Wins %
1 Melvin Mora 13.1 BAL 26 16.8
2 Carlos Beltran 10.0 KC 21 15.9
3 Ivan Rodriguez 11.2 DET 27 13.8
4 Julio Lugo 8.8 TB 23 12.8
5 Carlos Guillen 10.3 DET 27 12.7

Interestingly, these are all up-the-middle defensive players.

The Missing M.O.

As David Adesnik notes, the Reagan foreign policy legacy of using democracy promotion as a strategy and not just an aspiration is alive and well in the Bush Administration’s Iraq policy.
But there is one significant area in which Bush has thus far not made use of the Reagan era precedents. There were, to simplify a bit, three major foreign policy approaches during the Cold War. One, identified primarily with the Nixon and Ford years, was Detente: treating the Soviet Union as if it was any other nation and making deals that presupposed that we could peacefully co-exist with a massive tyranny. One, identified mostly with Truman and JFK, was Containment: the idea that if we refused to do anything to assist the Soviets and opposed their expansion at every turn, the combination of the Communist centrally planned economic system and the Soviet empire’s ethnic tensions (George Kennan particularly stressed the latter) would sooner or later cause the whole system to collapse under its own weight. The third, coined during the Eisenhower years, was Rollback – the idea that rather than wait passively for trouble, the United States should work to undermine Communist control of captive nations.
It’s clear that no administration relied exclusively on one of these strategies; most tended to pursue a mixture of all three, but there was a distinct shift in emphasis from one administration to the next, and the Reagan years involved particularly agressive efforts not only to peel back recent Communist gains but to undermine the basis of Communist tyranny in the heartland of the Warsaw Pact nations.
Of course, a similar debate over the overall strategy is alive today, as President Bush pushes for rolling back the terror-sponsoring tyrannies of the Arab world, while critics argue for a more reactive “containment” strategy. What’s particularly worth remembering from the Reagan years, however, is that there were multiple ways to skin the cat of Soviet oppression, and the Bush team doesn’t seem to be doing much to project two of America’s most potent weapons: material support for domestic insurgencies fighting within tyrranies, and ensuring that our message gets heard within those nations.
On the latter there have been some efforts to revive the “Radio Free Europe” concept for the Arab world. On the former, though, we seem to have no strategy. Granted, supporting revolts within Iraq failed miserably in the 1990s. But in some of the other Arab or Muslim states in the region, the ground may be more fertile, notably in Iran, where popular discontent with the mullahrchy appears to be widespread. We don’t want or need to wait to go to open war with Iran to put our efforts into weakening or removing its oppressive government.

Disney Spam?

I’m getting what appear to be spam comments . . . leading to the Disney Online website. What’s with that?
I should add my particular annoyance that I tend to get comment spam attacks on weekends, especially holiday weekends, when I have the least time to deal (at least during the week I get an hour or so of uninterrupted blogging time every morning with breakfast).

Nothing To See Here, Please Move Along

Stryker notices a verrrry interesting World Tribune report about a briefing by UN inspectors to the Security Council:

The United Nations has determined that Saddam Hussein shipped weapons of mass destruction components as well as medium-range ballistic missiles before, during and after the U.S.-led war against Iraq in 2003.
The UN Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission briefed the Security Council on new findings that could help trace the whereabouts of Saddam’s missile and WMD program.
The briefing contained satellite photographs that demonstrated the speed with which Saddam dismantled his missile and WMD sites before and during the war. Council members were shown photographs of a ballistic missile site outside Baghdad in May 2003, and then saw a satellite image of the same location in February 2004, in which facilities had disappeared.


I’m not so sure about the World Tribune’s sources or credibility, but as usual this sounds like it could bear watching.
UPDATE: The World Tribune is apparently a NewsMax-style wire service run by some Washington Times staffers, so a grain of salt is appropriate, but most of the various pieces of this story are basically confirmed by reports in the Washington Post, the San Francisco Chronicle, and that right-wing rag, the New York Times. However, these sources don’t refer to shipments of materiel prior to the Iraq war, focusing instead on the banned missile components disappearing after the war.

20th Century Sunset

I have to say, the whole Reagan memorial week, coming on the heels of the dedication of the World War II memorial and the last D-Day anniversary that most of the veterans of that war will attend, felt like a funeral for the 20th century. Oh, there were end-of-century retrospectives in 1999, but we’re now far enough into the new century, with enough new problems and traumas behind us to give some distance and perspective, to see more clearly the century that preceded. The involvement of so many of the other key figures of the last half of the century in remembring Reagan – Thatcher, the Pope, Gorbachev, Walesa – underlined that.

OTHER The Long Road Back

NY Newsday reports that Olympic figure skating champ Sarah Hughes, who’s something of a folk hero in these parts (she lives two towns over from my house), is considering returning to competition. Judging from recent photos, though, Hughes will probably be fighting the uphill battle against competing after puberty that has done in so many female athletes in sports like figure skating, gymnastics, etc.