Bullish on Bush

Jay Cost, who seems to be one of the most optimistic poll-readers these days, in an item posted yesterday:

Present Probability that Bush will win the Electoral College: 96.36% (This is the probability that Bush wins FL and IA and WI or OH. Thus, we can be 96.36% confident that Bush would receive a minimum of either 271 EVs or 281 EVs).

[snip]

Right now the EV math is looking awfully tough for Kerry. He is definitely behind in FL, IA and, though I do not cover it here, NM. This gives Bush a minimum of 266 EVs. Plus, Bush is likely leading in OH and WI — and I think Kerry will be unable to hold MN when all is said and done. The word on the ground is that BC04’s organization in MN is a sight to behold. The big question on my mind right now is not whether Bush gets to 269, but whether he breaks 300 (which he would do if he carries FL, IA, NM, WI, OH and MN — that would be 306).


Personally, I continue to believe that Florida, not Ohio, is the real key right now, because winning Florida gives Bush (or, to a lesser extent, Kerry) multiple ways to win, while losing Florida leaves Bush with almost no margin for error and Kerry with none.

More Bedfellow Award Candidates

*Tonight’s final pre-election broadcast of 60 Minutes weighs in, as you knew it would, with a last-ditch Kerry campaign commercial submission for the Bedfellow award with this Steve Kroft piece charging a lack of armor and equipment for soldiers in Iraq. Of course, the show ran late due to football, so it’s debatable how many people caught the whole thing.
*More on bin Laden’s effort to meddle in U.S. elections – should we read something into this MEMRI translation of one of his statements?

Your security is not in the hands of Kerry or Bush or al Qaeda. Your security is in your own hands, and any U.S. state that does not toy with our security automatically guarantees its own security.

Why They Fight

I was reading The Atlantic Monthly earlier today and came across a very lengthy and eloquent “letter to the editor” by a Marine Reservist who served in Iraq. Anyway, since the Atlantic makes you subscribe to access much of its online content, I couldn�t reprint it as it appeared, but it turns out the main text of the letter has circulated before. Here is the full text. (Via Pejman Yousefzadeh). Here is an excerpt:

The analogy is simple. For years, you have watched the same large, violent man come home every night, and you have listened to his yelling and the crying and the screams of children and the noise of breaking glass, and you have always known that he was beating his wife and his children. Everyone on the block has known it. You ask, cajole, threaten, and beg him to stop, on behalf of the rest of the neighborhood. Nothing works. After listening to it for 13 years, you finally gather up the biggest, meanest guys you can find, you go over to his house, and you kick the door down. You punch him in the face and drag him away. The house is a mess, the family poor and abused – but now there is hope. You did the right thing.


It�s worth reading in full.
UPDATE: From that same issue and available here, Robert Kaplan had a good piece on the clash of cultures between the generally liberal media and the generally conservative military. This quote, about the value military men tend to place on plain speaking, struck me:

One Air Force master sergeant told me, �I reject the notion that Bush is inarticulate. He is more articulate than Clinton. When Bush says something, he’s clear enough that you argue about whether you agree with him or not. When Clinton talks, you argue over what he really meant.�

Election Night Timeline

Here’s a handy scorecard of the poll-closing times in each state on Tuesday night. The first states to close up the polls entirely start at 7pm EST and include two early indicators: New Hampshire and Virginia. Bush is going to win Virginia, but if it’s close, that could be a bad indicator. New Hampshire has been fiercely contested; I expect Kerry to take it, but a Bush victory is certainly still possible. Bush taking New Hampshire would not be fatal but it would be a very bad sign for Kerry, as this is the swing state in which Kerry has spent the most time (other than perhaps Iowa) and the one most likely to be receptive to his New England persona.
At 7:30 we get North Carolina and West Virginia, two more Southern states that could be warnings of weakness for Bush but that Bush will win even if he’s losing. And we get Ohio, although for a variety of reasons, if Ohio is as close as everyone thinks it will be, it could be a long time before the networks announce a winner. Recall that the networks appear to have absorbed the lessons of incorrectly calling Florida for Gore early on Election Night 2000 (before the polls closed in the most Republican parts of the state, in fact); any state that looks close won’t get announced until they are sure.
8pm brings the witching hour for a huge swath of the country, including Florida, Michigan, Pennsylvania and New Jersey. Again, if we’re looking for knockout blows, look at MI and NJ; if Bush wins NJ, Kerry is toast in a big way, and if he wins MI, the math gets really ugly for Kerry. And frankly, the more I do the electoral math, the harder it is to see how Kerry can win a close one without Florida, because he then needs to win almost every other state that’s even remotely contested. Shortly after 8, in other words, is the first point at which Election Night could for all intents and purposes be over if the networks have clear enough winners to start calling a bunch of states (Bush can win if he loses both Florida and Ohio, but it’s hugely improbable).
After that, brace for the long haul, as Wisconsin, Minnesota and New Mexico don’t check in until 9pm, Iowa at 10, and Hawaii at 11pm, and of course some states (like Oregon) aren’t likely to be declared for weeks.

The Case For War – The First Time

OK, a blast from the past, but one that still has some timeliness today. I finally got around to digging out a column I wrote in December 1990, back when I was a college sophmore, laying out the case for war with Iraq. The first one, of course. In college, I wrote a weekly op-ed column, mostly politics and campus events (we already had Bill Simmons writing the main sports column).
It’s interesting, of course, to see how much the arguments then echoed the ones those of us who supported the second war made again, especially the bottom-line conclusion: “there is not just one reason to stop Hussein, but every reason to stop him.” You can read the whole thing here.
One major change in my thinking since then, of course, is my attitude towards Israel; until the Gulf War, I had generally fallen into the “Israel as an ally is more trouble than it is worth” camp, and that comes out here.

OK, He’s Not Dead

Mark Steyn is eating crow served by his readers on his longstanding argument that bin Laden died in December 2001. Meanwhile, Beldar thinks bin Laden’s “leave us alone and we will leave you alone” theme is an effort to speak the language of appeasement: “I think it’s a very clear attempt to begin negotiations with a Kerry administration for a “cease-fire” in the Global War on Terror.” You don’t have to think that Kerry would accept such a proposal – as Beldar apparently does – to worry about the possibility that Kerry has succeeded in communicating to the rest of the world, which may have trouble grasping the nuances of his position, that he would do precisely that.

PATRIOT GAMES: Wait until THIS YEAR!!!

Seventh in a series of reflections on sports by “Andy Tollhaus,” an Army officer currently serving in Iraq.
Thursday, October 28, 2004
FOB Speicher, Iraq

If you�re a New England farmer reading this, I have a request for you. Please go outside and check to see if your cows are still producing milk. Have you checked since Thursday morning? Check again. Just to be sure.
ESPN Radio is reporting today that the earth does seem to still be spinning on its axis. So we�ve got that going for us, which is nice.
I read an article a few years ago (maybe 1998 or 1999) with a preseason prediction that the Red Sox would win the World Series. The article opened with several �Armageddon-is-upon-us� scenarios, including all dairy cows in New England ceasing to produce milk. I remember thinking that there was actually a possibility that this one might come true, but, of course, we�d never know.
I didn�t use any milk, but I did do some toasting last night, with my St. Pauli�s (Non-Alcoholic) beer. It was neither the �near-beer� nor the sportsbar like appearance of �Club Boston� that made me feel as if I could be watching the game in a bar near Quincy Market. I could hear about thirty Boston accents talking about their SOX in the WORLD SERIES! Those accents all came from a group of soldiers from the 323rd Maintenance Company, an Army Reserve unit out of Devens, MA.

Continue reading PATRIOT GAMES: Wait until THIS YEAR!!!

He Said It, Not Me

Josh Marshall, who ought to be an expert on this particular subject, on Democrats’ reactions to the bin Laden tape:

[Emails Marshall received] struck me with what is one of the Democrats’ greatest weaknesses: their vulnerability to getting knocked off stride by the rush of events, their tendency to fret that all is lost, almost to indulge in it, when the car hits a simple bump in the road.

(Emphasis in original). Note that Marshall has been down this road before. Which party do you trust to stick to its guns when times are hardest?

Bedfellow Award Season

I have, in the past, threatened to hand out – but never got around to awarding – a “Bedfellow Award” for too-late-to-respond hits in the campaign season, especially (but not exclusively) false ones. The name comes from the comic strip “Bloom County,” in which Senator Bedfellow was defeated on the strength of an election-day headline, “WARNING: VOTING FOR BEDFELLOW MAY CAUSE HERPES”.
2002 had loads of candidates, including the flap over the Wellstone memorial service; the 2003 winner probably went to the LA Times sexual harrassment story on Schwarzenegger (the accuracy of which never seems to have been examined, although I don’t doubt that there was a good deal of truth to it, given Arnold’s reputation), although there may be something I’m forgetting; the Kerry-intern story was a good example from the primaries, although the rolling nature of primary elections gave him time to get the truth out before more damage was done.
The simplest definition of a Bedfellow Award nominee is a news story that (1) comes out shortly before the election, and (2) has a much larger impact on the election than it would have if it had come out earlier. Obviously, (2) is particularly true of stories that are false or misleading, since they tend to be easier to explain or debunk if they come out with adequate time to respond. If I get enough nominees, I’ll hand out awards for the presidential race, a Senate race and maybe a House race, as well as an award for each party.
Anyway, we’ve got a battery of candidates so far in this year’s presidential election (let alone the Senate and House races), and the late hits – some true, some false, some fair, some inserted by people outside the US political process – keep rolling in fast and furious:
*Will word come out that Kerry was not, initially, honorably discharged from the Navy?
*A new bin Laden video! (See here, link via McArdle, in which bin Laden seems to be relying on “Fahrenheit 9/11” for his talking points, and here, in which a very sad-looking bin Laden sounds like he’s cribbing from DNC speeches for material, ripping the “inflexibility of the American-Israeli alliance” and accusing Bush of “misleading” the American people. Is it for real? Is it recent? Will there be enough time to tell the difference?
*Another example just from Instapundit’s backup singers: Michael Totten links to this FOX News report saying maybe we really did protect and dispose of at least a big chunk of those missing explosives. The whole HMX/RDX story, of course, is a leading candidate for the award at the moment, but there’s plenty of time for more.
Anyway, those are just the early entries; we’ll get crazier stuff still as we go. Put your favorite candidates in the comments – and I’ll update this post as we go – and I’ll try to hand out awards after the election.
UPDATE: (And I’ve also added a little to the text above). From NRO Battlegrounders, word that a Pennsylvania judge has unsealed records from a Heinz family lawsuit over the death of Teresa Heinz Kerry’s first husband, records that could potentially shed more light on the family’s finances. There probably isn’t much news in there, but if there is, there won’t be time to give it context.

A September 11 Miniseries

Michele is appalled. I do think there will and should eventually be a good movie or TV treatment of September 11, but more years of time, distance and perspective are still needed, as was the case with movies about, say, the Holocaust. ABC and NBC shouldn’t be touching this right now. Of course, Hollywood being what it is these days, they’ll probably change it so neo-Nazis fly the planes into the towers.

Kay on HMX

Saw David Kay being interviewed by Soledad O’Brien on CNN’s American Morning this morning on the issue of accounting for Iraq’s prewar stocks of heavy-duty conventional explosives HMX and RDX (a link to the transcript should be posted on this page later today). Specifically, they watched a newly-released (as of last night, I think; I confess that this story is unfolding too fast for me to have confidence that I’ve followed every twist in it). First off, agree with him or not – or agree with him only in part – you have to like David Kay; his bluntness stands in stark contrast to the doublespeak of most international bureaucrats, and he mostly doesn’t seem to have a dog in the various fights he weighs in on (recall how his initial report cheered opponents of the war with his declaration that “we were nearly all wrong” about Saddam having WMD, and also cheered proponents of war with his insistence that Saddam was deceiving and evading inspections and that Iraq was even more dangerous, on the whole, than we thought).
Anyway, once again Kay’s recollections and analysis of the video gives a little something to everyone. His points, in no particular order:
1. He (Kay) had argued during the 1990s for destroying this stuff, but Hans Blix gave in to the Iraqi regime’s demand that they be allowed to keep it for civilian construction purposes.
2. The tape (apparently shot by US media in April 2003, if I heard correctly) clearly shows an unbroken IAEA seal on at least one bunker, indicating that there was still some quantity of the explosives there at the time US troops arrived.
3. To Kay’s eye, it’s clear that the tape shows the presence of HMX. Kay didn’t talk about RDX. Since I, like most bloggers, had never heard of either one until four days ago, I’m still mulling the significance of this, but as I noted below, Wizbang has been looking into the RDX side of the ledger.
4. Kay believes that US troops would and should have recognized these as explosives but, not being professional weapons inspectors, would likely not have recognized them as stocks of HMX.
5. Kay thinks the troops, having located stocks of explosives, should have been responsible for guarding them.
6. Although he didn’t discuss the logistics of moving 360 or 380 or whatever tons of the stuff, Kay cautioned that you would be surprised at the things that looters, moving without trucks, can cart away by hand. He noted having seen people literally dismantling and taking away buildings brick by brick.
7. Kay stressed that it’s important to keep in perspective the fact that this was just a small percentage of the high explosives in Iraq; he asserted (and this surprised even me) that Iraq possessed approximately 2/3 the amount of explosives as the US military, a staggering quantity for a country the size of California that could barely feed its people.

Dogs Not Barking

Looking back over my recent take on the election, I�m actually struck by some of the things I left out. Notably, the things we�re not paying attention to, especially in foreign affairs.
In 2000, Bush and Gore famously never debated the issue of terrorism. Today, the election has focused on the fight against al Qaeda, the insurgency in Iraq and, to a lesser degree, on Iran and North Korea, with a dash of Darfur thrown in. As some have noted, however, that leaves an awful lot of the world undiscussed. Might there not be big things we don�t see coming or big areas that we are taking for granted because things are going fairly well?

Continue reading Dogs Not Barking

Europeans for Bush

As you can see below, I�ve paid some attention to who�s been endorsing who, but I confess to being pretty shocked that Germany�s largest, in fact Europe�s largest, newspaper has apparently endorsed President Bush. (Via Michael Totten).
Of course, it would be a little hypocritical for me to put too much stock in this, especially since the paper�s reasoning seems to be that Europeans should support Bush because it will keep them from having to do any heavy lifting in the War on Terror. But it is a nice reminder that world opinion is not as monolithic as some would have us believe. See here for another excellent example of that.
UPDATE (from the Crank): According to the left-wing Guardian, add Tony Blair, who of course won’t come out and say it publicly, to the list of world leaders backing Bush:

The Prime Minister fretted to one close friend: ‘Whenever Bush weakens in the polls, they start mucking about.’
Who are these ‘they’ whose ‘mucking about’ makes Tony Blair so anxious? They are Iran with its sponsorship of terrorism and its ambitions to go nuclear. They are Syria. They are the psychotic regime in North Korea along with the rest of the planet’s rogue and risk states.
The mind of Mr Blair was summarised for me in vivid terms by someone who has an extremely good claim to know what is going on inside it: ‘Tony thinks the world is a very dangerous and precarious place. Bush is the tough guy who keeps the bad guys under their rocks.’

To All Those Who Missed It

I liked this comment from Shannen Coffin about the Red Sox:

My dad was one of those hundreds of thousands (millions?) of fans who died without ever seeing them win it all. He was way too young to go. As a kid, every year, weathered by years of disappointment, he would tell me, “It’s not October yet; don’t get too excited.” Well, Dad, it’s October now. We did it. Wish you had been there with me. Rest in glorious peace.


UPDATE: Also, leave poor Bill Buckner alone!

An RDX Disposal Question

Paul at Wizbang wants answers. For now, all he has is a potentially plausible working hypothesis: that by January 2003, all but 3 tons of the 141 tons of RDX at Al Qa’qaa was gone from that facility, and that IAEA inspectors knew this and withheld the fact from the UN Security Council during the pre-war debate. If you can help shed light on his analysis, drop by and lend a link or a comment.
I have to say, given that “there were no dangerous weapons in Iraq” was one of the points Kerry had decisively won in this year’s political debate, he seems to have shot himself in the foot by placing so much emphasis on the eve of the election on the dangers posed by these conventional weapons that were in Saddam’s hands before the war.

Chutzpah Award

Stuart Buck passes along word of an Alice-in-Wonderland decision to prevent the Ohio Secretary of State from investigating what may well be a substantial number of voter registrations – on the grounds that the individuals can’t be notified of a hearing on the matter because they don’t live at the addresses they used to register! (Coincidentally, the decision is by a Clinton appointee who is the wife of one of Ohio’s leading plaintiffs’ attorneys – what are the odds of that?)

BASEBALL/ Schilling for Bush

I’m going to offer a perhaps-unexpected (to new readers, at least) point here and say that now is not the time, and a puff-piece interview on Good Morning America was not the place, for Curt Schilling to stump for President Bush. The stakes in this election are indeed life and death, and of course I welcome Schilling’s endorsement. But:
1. I’ve long been infuriated by entertainers who stick their politics into a venue (interviews, concerts, etc.) where I’m expecting to just be entertained, as opposed to presenting a political argument in a political context. That should go for conservatives in sports and entertainment just as much as liberals. There’s a reason why, despite the baseball/politics mix on this site, I labor to keep the two types of content clearly marked.
2. Sox fans are celebrating right now, and, let’s be frank, a lot of them are Democrats. Don’t spoil that with politics, no matter the cause; just don’t (more on that idea here).
Random links:
Commonwealth Conservative on why he loves baseball.
Tim Lambert on – for what it’s worth now – home field advantages in the World Series.
The Red Sock of Courage.

They Went Down To The Courthouse, And The Judge Put It All To Rest

Ann Althouse notes that there is really no way to stop a large number of Illinois Democrats from voting for Kerry in Wisconsin following a joint Springsteen performance/Kerry appearance that 60,000 people are expected to attend. Of course, this looks like a prime opportunity for Republicans, for once, to keep a close eye out for ballot fraud without getting accused of racism in the process, as Bruce’s fan base is pretty white.
UPDATE: Althouse says not too many people went and voted after the rally anyway. Which is good news.

The Day After

I have to admit it: try as I might, it’s awfully difficult to find anything to add to the moment from last night, just the perfection of the moment of fans and a franchise who’d been denied and cruelly taunted – by fate and by Yankee fans – for eight decades – finally making it to the top of the mountain. Just a few thoughts:
*The Cards had to do the most staggering roll-over-play-dead in the World Series since the 1999 Braves or maybe the 1990 A’s. It looks like Game One really was the turning point; after the Cards couldn’t get over the hump, they just never got anything going. For a team that took the National League by storm, that was shocking, especially on the offensive side.
*Nice job by Jason Marquis to keep the Cards in the game last night; I’m skeptical of Marquis because he’s a high-walk pitcher who doesn’t compensate by overpowering people, but after getting on the ropes early he did manage to avoid the KO.
*More, much more on this (and other bigger-picture questions) later in November and December – after this morning, I will probably shift into politics-only here through next Wednesday or whenever it is that the election is resolved – but you have to figure Curt Schilling is suddenly, improbably closing in on a pretty solid Hall of Fame case. Of course, you would have said the same thing (and I know I did) about Jack Morris after Game Seven of the 1991 Series.
*Manny Ramirez matching Hank Bauer’s record 17-game postseason hitting streak and winning the Series MVP just feels odd – Manny never did bust out with the big longball, and didn’t even drive in a run against the Yankees. Yet again, as always, his overall postseason numbers were less impressive than his regular season stats. Yet, somehow, he just kept poking a hit here and a hit there, and it added up to good things.
*If you own stock in Dan Shaughnessy, sell. (Bruce Allen has the full Boston media roundup)

Another Endorsement

It’s not exactly a surprise, but given the publicity machine that surrounds the handful of September 11 widows who have consistently agitated against President Bush, it’s worth noting this open letter of support for Bush from a much longer list of families of people killed on September 11.
I’m sure that there are also plenty of other Bush supporters among those who, like me, were fortunate to survive the attacks.

YOUR WORLD CHAMPION BOSTON RED SOX

Never thought I’d live to write that. The dog finally caught the bus; Charlie Brown kicked the football; Gilligan got off the island. Not being a hockey fan – I remember the Rangers winning the Stanley Cup, but I wasn’t really able to appreciate it – the closest thing I can compare this to is the fall of the Berlin Wall in terms of the “never thought I’d see the day” factor. Wow, just wow.
Technically, the 21st century began in 2001, not 2000. Which means, of course, that the Red Sox have won a World Series in this century. And the Yankees have not.

Prayers For Repentance

I can pray for billionaire terrorist Yasser Arafat to repent his sins. But, as with Fidel Castro, I feel not a shred of guilt in hoping for his death, which will improve and perhaps save countless lives. Roger Simon wonders if he’s dead already, and on the very day that Ariel Sharon wins approval for his Nixon-goes-to-China plan for unilateral pullback of some of the settlements.
Back to the ballgame.

The Vet Vote

McQ notes a number of polls breaking down different voting blocs, with interesting commentary. One significant group:

A Rasmussen Reports survey shows that military veterans prefer George W. Bush over John Kerry by a 58% to 35% margin. Those with no military service favor Kerry by ten percentage points, 51% to 41%.


McQ notes one obvious reason for this:

I�m pretty plugged into the vets community and I�ve never, ever heard talk like I�ve heard about John Kerry among veterans. Let me succintly characterize it by saying the comments could easily interchange “Fonda” for “Kerry” if you know what I mean. There are a great number of vets who are still angry about those two and intend to demonstrate that anger on Nov. 2nd.


The line you often hear quoted, from various sources, is about a Kerry defeat being the parade Vietnam vets never had. Of course, consider this in tandem with the 75% or so support that Bush appears to get from both active-duty military and from the Guard and Reserves, and the overall picture is not one of great love for Kerry by his fellow veterans and soldiers.

Um, About Those Late-Breaking Undecideds . . .

Rasmussen has the goods:

Among voters who made up their minds in the Spring of 2004 or sooner, Kerry is favored by a 51% to 48% margin. This obviously includes some who decided to vote for anybody-but-Bush since 36% of voters made up their mind before the Democratic nominee was selected.
The candidates are essentially tied among those who made up their minds during the summer. However, those who decided in the past month favor President Bush by a 57% to 38% margin.
Our sample included 136 Likely Voters who made up their mind over the last week. These voters also appear to be breaking in the President’s direction but the small sample size prevents any definitive assessment.
There are very few undecided voters today. Those who have recently made their final decision are most likely firming up a choice for the candidate they have been leaning towards for some period of time.
At the moment, 93% of Bush voters are certain they won’t change their mind and 89% of Kerry voters say the same. Our daily Presidential Tracking Poll shows that just 2% of voters remain undecided at this time (many of whom may not vote).


Also, Powerline links to a great column by Ralph Peters about the 2004 election and its impact on the ground game in Iraq.
UPDATE: Hugh Hewitt points to a 51-47 Bush lead among the most-likely voters of all: the 9% of all respondents to an ABC poll who say they have already voted by absentee ballot or early voting. I cast my own absentee ballot for Bush on Friday, to free myself up to volunteer on Election Day.

Daily Must-Reads for 10/27/04

*Lileks on Andrew Sullivan’s Kerry endorsement. The closing line, which Lileks has delivered by Tony Blair, is deadly.
*The Sultan of Snark on Ron Suskind: “If Suskind misreads his own facts wrong in order to (willfully? subconsciously?) pander to New York Times readers’ fear of Christian fundamentalism, what other facts has he misread? And what kind of ’empiricist’ is he?” I also liked the line about the “imperturbable” Andrew Sullivan.
*Ricky West has another video up, and reminds us of Clinton’s magic coattails.
*Will Collier on heavy early-voting turnout in Georgia, nobody’s idea of a battleground. High turnout in Georgia, of all places, tends to undercut the idea that it’s Kerry’s supporters who are fired up. Remember, you have a lot of people out there who support the war and have had to keep silent as the media has poured hot boiling scorn on the war effort for the past couple of years.
Either way, I predict that the loser of this election will get substantially more votes than any prior presidential candidate in history. And if Kerry wins, Bush would break with a long tradition of incumbents losing only if they have a severe split in their party, a major third party candidate and/or a catastrophic setback on the order of Watergate, the Great Depression or the one-two punch of stagflation and the Iranian hostage crisis.
*Jay Cost (link via NRO Battlegrounders) on why he thinks the Bush-Cheney campaign has a decisive advantage in the Ohio ground game that will show up on Election Day. I’m prepared to believe, among other things, that the GOP’s get out the vote (GOTV) effort benefits from being an integrated organization as compared to the alphabet soup of “independent” groups working for the Dems, but I’m more skeptical about the idea that there’s some enormous hidden advantage here that Karl Rove knows about and we don’t.
Who controls the British pound? Who keeps the metric system down?
Karl Rove! Karl Rove!
Who leaves Atlantis off the maps? Who keeps the Martians under wraps?
Karl Rove! Karl Rove!
Who holds back the electric car? Who makes Steve Gutenberg a star?
Karl Rove! Karl Rove!
Who robs cavefish of their sight? Who rigs every Oscar night?
Karl Rove! Karl Rove!

Birds on the Brink

Well, after what we saw last week, and in light of Red Sox history as well as the dire condition of Curt Schilling’s ankle, it’s hard to say that we should count the Cardinals out just yet. But things look pretty grim. I have to say, even though I’m pulling for the Red Sox, I feel awfully bad for Cardinal fans (which must be a sign that I’m finally over my bitterness from 1985 and 1987), who had a genuinely great team this year; that’s a rare treat, and one that’s spoiled if they don’t go all the way, as fans of the 2001 Mariners could tell you.
Pedro may not have been the San Pedro de Fenway of old last night, but he did a tremendous job shutting down the murderous Cardinal lineup. I expect the Cards to come out and finally pond the stuffings out of Derek Lowe, but it will probably be too late.
One memory that came back watching Larry Walker get thrown out at the plate was back in Walker’s rookie year, 1989, when the Expos dropped to two games back in the pennant race on August 23, in a game they lost 1-0 in 22 innings when Walker was called out in the bottom of the 16th for leaving third base early on a sacrifice fly. I have to wonder if he’s been more tentative about breaking for home on a fly ball ever since.

Let Down

Even though I know this site has a bunch of Red Sox fan readers, from the perspective of a neutral fan, mainly looking to watch entertaining, competitive baseball, I must confess to being pretty disappointed in this World Series. Thus far, it�s been one-sided, sloppy and anti-climactic.
Of course, I�m sure I would feel differently if my team was on the verge of its first championship in 86 years. Or maybe I�m just grumpy because I had such high hopes and because my prediction now appears to have been far off. But it is looking like it�s over � we all know teams can�t come back from down 3-0�right?

Getting The Job Done

The latest and apparently last theory that Kerry and his media allies have settled on is to attack Bush’s execution of the War on Terror, including both the Iraq war and Afghanistan; the theme of the attacks has been that Bush is incompetent, which is taken now as received wisdom beyond challenge by fact. Go read Greg Djerejian’s long essay on this point, and yesterday’s shorter Wall Street Journal op-ed (for a similar analysis, see Dan Darling on the Washington Post’s effort to argue that the Iraq war and anti-Iran hardliners undermined the al Qaeda manhunt). Both contribute to a few of the key points that need to be borne in mind in evaluating the Bush Administration’s performance:
1. War is a difficult and complex endeavor, requiring the making of scores of decisions large and small. Many of those decisions are, by their very nature, made on the basis of severely incomplete information, fraught with uncertainty and likely to have lethal consequences if they go wrong – and often if they go right, as well. The military acronym SNAFU got that way for a reason. Bush, by leading the nation in wartime, is certain to make more mistakes, and with worse consequences, than any peacetime president.
2. The history of wars, in fact, is almost unbroken in the making of catastrophic misjudgments by even the best of wartime leaders. Certainly if you review the records of Lincoln, FDR and Churchill, three of the models of civilian leadership in war, they and their generals and civilian advisers made numerous errors that cost scores of lives, many of which in retrospect seem like obvious blunders. I’d like the critics who formerly supported Bush and have now abandoned him to at least admit that on the same grounds, they would have voted for Dewey in 1944 and McClellan in 1864.
3. More specifically to the issue at hand, in almost all cases, the decisions by Bush and his civilian and military advisers involved avoiding alternatives that had their own potential bad consequences, and the critics are judging these decisions in a vacuum. The decision to disband Saddam’s army and undergo a thorough de-Ba’athification is a classic example, cited incessantly by critics on the Left. But what if Bush had kept that army together, and they had acted in the heavy-handed (to put it mildly) fashion to which the Ba’athists were accustomed, say, by firing on crowds of civilians? Isn’t it an absolute certainty that all the same critics would be singing “meet the new boss, same as the old boss,” accusing Bush’s commitment to democracy as being a sham and a cover for a desire to set up friendly tyrants to keep the oil pumping, that we’d hear constantly about how we’ve alienated the Iraqi people by enabling their oppressors, how we showed misunderstanding of the country by leaving a minority Sunni power structure in place over the Shi’ite majority? Wouldn’t we hear the very same things we hear now about Afghanistan, about using too few US troops and “outsourcing” the job, or the same civil-liberties concerns we hear when we turn over suspects for interrogation to countries without our restraint when it comes to torture? Don’t insult our intelligence and try to deny it.
The same goes for many decisions. More troops? We’d hear that this is a heavy-handed US occupation. I mean, we heard something like that when Giuliani put more cops on the street in New York, let alone a foreign country. Like most conservatives, my preference would have been to go hard into Fallujauh in April. But even if the alternative decision to hold off until there could be significant Iraqi participation in the assault was wrong, it was not an illogical one, but rather a decision made with the patience and foresight to consider the long-range political consequences in Iraq of differing military approaches.
4. Many of the decisions at issue here, from specific ground commanders’ decisions to secure particular sites to Tommy Franks’ call on Tora Bora, were decisions principally made by people lower in the chain of command, many of them in the military. This is not to say that Bush, as the head of that chain of command, is not ultimately responsible to the voters for those decisions; he is. But it is to remind people that they are not second-guessing solely the judgments of a small coterie of the president and civilian advisers, but the entire chain of command. Tom Maguire makes this point explicitly with regard to Tora Bora:

[I]f the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff chose not to overrule his subordinate, why should Bush? This . . . actually strenghtens Bush’s case – the issue was identified, alternatives were weighed, and a decision was made. We all wish the right guess had been made, but I, at least, am glad that the decision making team was aware of the issues and the alternatives.
If Kerry is campaigning on a promise to make the battlefield decisions and always make the right ones, good for him. Say Anything, John.


5. Much of the criticism has focused on the idea that Bush needs to admit more errors, and that Kerry would be better at recognizing and admitting mistakes. Djerejian zeroes in on an argument made by David Adesnik and Dan Drezner:

[P]eople like Drezner and Adesnik are asking: maybe Kerry’s a gamble–but at least he’s not a proven train wreck. While Adesnik think “accountability”, in the main, is the issue that has gotten waverers on board for Kerry–the real core grievance appears to be best reflected, instead, in this Adesnik graf that Drezner approvingly links too:

As a professional researcher, I think I simply find it almost impossible to trust someone whose thought process is apparently so different from my own.
In theory, I am sure that Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld all believe in evaluating the relevant data and adjusting their decisions to reflect reality. Thus, when I say that I object to the way that this administration makes decisions, I am saying that I do not believe that it has lived up to the intellectual standard it presumably accepts. [emphasis added]

Let’s put all this in plainer English, OK? What Dan and David are saying, I think, is: When this Bush team effs up (and they have effed up a lot), are they able to (on a bare-bones constitutive level, say): a) even recognize they have effed up and b) then move to redress the eff up?


As an initial matter, admitting mistakes, especially in wartime, is overrated, particularly if that means (1) admitting a decision was wrong before you have all the information to reach a final conclusion about it, or (2) making a public self-analysis that gives useful information to the enemy. How often did Churchill, battling daily to keep up the fighting spirit of the British, go on the radio to say, “sorry folks, I blew it again and got a bunch of people killed”? I tend to think that Bush made a big mistake of this kind when he conceded the point last summer on the inclusion in the State of the Union Address of British charges that Saddam was trying to buy uranium in Africa; as it turned out, the Brits stood by their report, and Saddam really did send an envoy there to do precisely that.
The more important point in wartime is the ability to recognize what’s not working and change tactics or, if appropriate, strategies. Djerejian cites several examples of Bush doing precisely that, most notably with the firing of Jay Garner but also extending to expanding the number of troops on the ground.
In any event, where, I would ask, is the evidence that Kerry is better at admitting mistakes than Bush? This is a guy who brought all sorts of political grief to himself by stubbornly refusing for three decades to admit that he was wrong to repeat false charges, under oath and on national televison, that smeared his comrades in Vietnam as guilty of pervasive war crimes. Has Kerry admitted he was wrong to oppose nearly every aspect of the foreign policy strategy that President Reagan pursused to great effect in the closing and victorious chapter of the Cold War? Has he admitted he was wrong to oppose the use of force to kick Saddam out of Kuwait in 1991? Maybe I missed something, but I don’t even recall him admitting he was wrong for trying to slash the intelligence budget in the mid-1990s following the first World Trade Center bombing. Indeed, one of the most common threads throughout Kerry’s behavior in this campaign has been his unwillingness to take any personal responsibility for mistakes, from blaming his speechwriters for things that come out of Kerry’s own mouth to picayune things like blaming the Secret Service when he falls down on the slopes. As Jonah Goldberg notes, Kerry’s “liberal hawk” backers may argue that the decades of bad judgment in Kerry’s past are rendered inoperative by September 11, but Kerry’s stubborn insistence that he hasn’t changed in response to September 11, and that he had the right answers all along even when he wrote a book in 1997 that barely mentioned Islamic terrorism, gives the lie to the notion that Kerry is a model of self-reflection. Even the man’s own supporters can’t seriously defend the proposition – on which many of them heaped well-deserved scorn during the primary season – that Kerry has been consistent from the start on whether Saddam was a serious threat that justified a military response. Yet there Kerry stands, insisting to all the world what nobody believes, that he hasn’t changed his position. Preferring Kerry to Bush because Bush won’t admit mistakes is like preferring fresh water to salt water because salt water is wet.
In any event, will Kerry somehow change, grow in office, shed a lifetime of bad judgments and blanching at the use of American power, suddenly stop valuing diplomacy as an end and the status quo as the highest virtue? Just because Bush changed in office means nothing. First of all, Bush was a guy who had already proven his willingness to change and admit his problems when he quit drinking, had a religious awakening and basically overhauled his whole approach to life in his forties; Kerry can show no similar example of a willingness to change. And Kerry is now in his sixties, six years older than Bush in 2000, and while Bush may count September 11 as a life-changing event, Kerry had already had his, in Vietnam. Kerry’s foreign policy world view was set decades ago, both by the example of his diplomat father and by Vietnam. The fact that Kerry has been malleable and vascillating over the years, clear a pattern though that may be, is no reason to think that he will suddenly re-examine his approach to accept the need for the United States to lead a continuing effort to overturn the corrupt, rotten and deadly status quo in the Arab and Muslim worlds.
6. The final charge is that Bush’s errors would be forgiveable if he had done more, earlier, to explain the risks and burdens of war to the American people. Of course, this has nothing to do with the execution of the war, but political leadership is important, and in many ways it’s much more the president’s job than is the decision to use X number of troops to seal off a particular location. First off, the charge that Bush argued the war would be easy is refuted by virtually all his speeches, in which he said over and over and over again that we were in for a long haul, and there would be difficult times ahead. Of course, that has long since become obvious from events, and in any event we really were not in a position before the war to know precisely how it would all play out. But I will agree that he never gave a Churchillian “blood, toil, tears and sweat” speech specifically about Iraq, and that many hawks in and out of the administration underestimated in their public arguments the difficulties of a post-conquest insurgency (then again, many doves told us that we’d be bogged down with thousands of casualties taking Baghdad). Of course, the war itself, up to and through the fall of Baghdad, was as much of a “cakewalk” as a real life shooting war against a substantial enemy can ever be; the problem is simply that we didn’t broadcast the coming insurgency (which, by the way, would have had the effect of greatly encouraging the insurgents).
In the end, that’s what this argument is all about – not the difficulties of war, which are well-understood, but simply a political argument about the use of speeches to predict the unpredictable. Moreover, on that ground, again, there’s no reason to think Kerry would be better; after all, Kerry is the guy who won’t even admit to this day that his war vote was a vote for war. Kerry’s the guy who wasn’t able to predict that his campaign would have to prepare for attacks by people who’d been holding a grudge against him for 30 years.
No, Bush hasn’t been a perfect war leader, but show me who was. He’s had tough calls to make, and unlike Kerry he can’t shift with the wind without consequence. Progress has been frustrating at times, because our overall enemy – the forces of terror and tyranny, of radical Islamism and fascist gangsterism – have recognized that an American victory in Iraq would be a defeat for them in the war on terror. You know that, I know that, they know that. But that just makes it all the more urgent to stick with a guy who believes in the mission, and who has proven that he will keep on trying new approaches until the job is finished, rather than looking for the door.

Fearmongering

OK, we’ve heard both sides say it over and over again, and I’m compelled to agree: both sides in the presidential campaign are appealing to fear. Of course, if your fears are rational, it may be a very logical thing to vote your fears. So, let’s just get on with it:
Kerry and Edwards want you to believe that George W. Bush is plotting to bring back the draft, stop Social Security benefits from being paid to today’s senior citizens, and turn firehoses on African-Americans who try to go vote. If you believe those things, you should vote for Kerry and Edwards.
Bush and Cheney want you to believe that Islamist terrorists are plotting to kill large numbers of Americans with terrorist attacks. If you believe that, you should vote for Bush and Cheney.

Irony Alert

In 1987, Dukakis staffer John Sasso sank the presidential aspirations of Joe Biden by distributing a videotape demonstrating that Biden had plaigarized parts of speeches. Dukakis fired Sasso for his troubles, although most observers today regard this as standard opposition research rather than a dirty trick.
Today’s New York Sun reports that Sasso’s candidate, John Kerry, stands accused of plaigarizing campaign materials and even parts of the 1997 book “The New War” that he used to burnish his image as a deep thinker, chunks of which bear strong resemblances to uncredited newspaper and magazine articles. Unlike in 1987, the charge is not likely to do much damage to Kerry – plaigarism scarcely seems to dent scholars these days, let alone politicians – and maybe it’s of a piece with the by-now well-known fact that Kerry’s idol, John F. Kennedy, had ghostwriters draft large sections of his award-winning book Profiles in Courage. But the irony should not be lost, at least.

Hitchens and Castro

Must-read: Hitchens on what you have to believe to believe that Zarqawi’s presence and organization in pre-invasion Iraq is not evidence of Saddam’s complicity with Islamist radical terrorists.
Also: Andrew Sullivan catches this quote, which I heartily endorse, from State Department spokesman Richard Boucher:

QUESTION: Did you hear that Castro fell?
MR. BOUCHER: We heard that Castro fell. There are, I think, various reports that he broke a leg, an arm, a foot, and other things, and I’d guess you’d have to check with the Cubans to find out what’s broken about Mr. Castro. We, obviously, have expressed our views about what’s broken in Cuba.
QUESTION: Do you wish him a speedy recovery?
MR. BOUCHER: No.


Castro definitely fits that narrow category of persons whose death would so improve the lives of so many that I feel no guilt in wishing him ill.
UPDATE: So the Bush Administration chose, for a variety of reasons (the quality of available intelligence is, as always, disputed), not to imitate Clinton’s ineffective missile strikes on Afghanistan but instead wait for the invasion to deal in toto with Zarqawi’s terror camps. And Saddam was able to plan an insurgency, move around dangerous weapons and possibly move men, money and weapons to Syria during the run-up to war. Which may well have included the high explosives the NY Times was huffing about yesterday, which the inspectors had left in Saddam’s hands (along with hundreds of thousands of tons of other conventional explosives) without concern.
I’m beginning to think Mark Steyn was right that the real problem with the Iraq War is that we waited too long trying to go through all the international hoops before invading, costing us the ability to catch Saddam by strategic surprise. And yet, as Wretchard puts it, “[t]he price of passing the “Global Test” was very high; and having been gypped once, there are some who are still eager to be taken to the cleaners again.”

Impractical Libertarians

Libertarian Jane Galt quotes Libertarian Party presidential candidate Michael Badnarik at length, on his theory that paying federal income taxes is not legally required, as proof that Badnarik is a fringe nut. If you vote for Badnarik, you are doing nothing to advance the cause of liberty.
If further proof were needed of the impracticality of doctrinaire libertarians, check out this revealing Reason Magazine symposium. Even Glenn Reynolds wasted his ballot in 2000 on Harry Browne. And Richard Epstein is voting for Badnarik!
The GOP has, in fact, committed sins against small-government libertarianism, some by wrongly buying in to big government and some by taking pro-law-enforcement and pro-life stances that I, as a conservative, approve of. But libertarian ideas are taken seriously in Republican circles, while they are scorned at every turn by the Democrats. And in the real world, if there is ever to be progress away from Big Government, it will require that the public accept fewer guaranteed entitlements and more individual decisionmaking. With his plans for private accounts in Social Security and Health Savings Accounts, Bush is far further out on the limb in favor of such progress than any presidential candidate since Goldwater. And whether Bush wins or loses, the GOP will be under pressure to nominate a spending hawk in the next campaign; that candidate’s job will be much easier if Bush has laid the groundwork for changing an entitlement system that dwarfs the size of any discretionary spending. And yes, Bush wants conservative judges; but conservative judges will do no more on social issues than leave them to the people’s elected representatives.
If libertarians can’t support Bush, faults and all, they are simply not interested in testing their ideas outside a laboratory.
UPDATE: The Mad Hibernian points me to Dale Franks’ endorsement of Bush as a counter-example of a libertarian (actually a neolibertarian, as the QandO guys call themselves) who understands the stakes:

It is utterly pointless and shortsighted to calculate about the future of the GOP when our primary concern right now is the threat of radical Islam. A retreat in the War on Terror that results in a decade of threats to American security like those that appeared in the 1970s could very well make domestic political calculations about the relative libertarian-ness of the GOP moot.


[snip]

. . . [I]n an election like this one, facing the Islamist threat, I simply don�t believe that any victory in this election can be taken as a referendum on domestic policy. It might say volumes about how the American people wish the War on Terror to be fought, but I doubt any case can be made that it would constitute a general expression of approval about, or predicts the future of, the L[ibertarian]/C[sonservative] idea in American politics.
In any event, I�m far more concerned with keeping the USS America from slipping beneath the waves than I am about watching the GOP sink. Maybe, once the last terrorist�s head is stuck on pike, I�ll be more concerned with the fate of the GOP�s L/C direction.
Until then, I want a president that I�m sure will pull the trigger, when it needs to be pulled. That president is George W. Bush.

The Stakes

Brilliant column by political science professor Mathew Manweller (found in the comments at Jane Galt’s place), on the stakes in this election:

America is at a once-in-a-generation crossroads, more than an election hangs in the balance. Down one path lies retreat, abdication and a reign of ambivalence. Down the other lies a nation that is aware of its past and accepts the daunting obligation its future demands. If we choose poorly, the consequences will echo through the next 50 years of history. If we, in a spasm of frustration, turn out the current occupant of the White House, the message to the world and ourselves will be two-fold.
First, we will reject the notion that America can do big things.
Once a nation that tamed a frontier, stood down the Nazis and stood upon the moon, we will announce to the world that bringing democracy to the Middle East is too big a task for us. But more significantly, we will signal to future presidents that as voters, we are unwilling to tackle difficult challenges, preferring caution to boldness, embracing the mediocrity that has characterized other civilizations. The defeat of President Bush will send a chilling message to future presidents who may need to make difficult, yet unpopular decisions. America has always been a nation that rises to the demands of history regardless of the costs or appeal. If we turn away from that legacy, we turn away from who we are.
Second, we inform every terrorist organization on the globe that the lesson of Somalia was well learned. In Somalia we showed terrorists that you don’t need to defeat America on the battlefield when you can defeat them in the newsroom. They learned that a wounded America can become a defeated America.
Twenty-four-hour news stations and daily tracking polls will do the heavy lifting, turning a cut into a fatal blow. Except that Iraq is Somalia times 10. The election of John Kerry will serve notice to every terrorist in every cave that the soft underbelly of American power is the timidity of American voters. Terrorists will know that a steady stream of grizzly [sic] photos for CNN is all you need to break the will of the American people. Our own self-doubt will take it from there. Bin Laden will recognize that he can topple any American administration without setting foot on the homeland.


Read the whole thing. Jay Nordlinger makes the same point:

Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, and Michael Moore are not supporting Kerry because they think he’ll continue the War on Terror � certainly not because they think he’ll do a better job of it. They are supporting him because they think he doesn’t mean it. I bet they’re right.
In my view, this election is not a contest to determine how we’ll fight the War on Terror; it’s a contest to determine whether we will fight it at all. And the decision made by the Americans will be fateful.
George W. Bush and his people think that our security requires wholesale changes in the Muslim world � changes that we must abet. The other side � which includes a portion of the Right � believes that we can just hunker down, lashing out when some occasion demands. And if only Israel weren’t so damn troublesome, perhaps the Arabs would be calmer.
I have never liked the terms “pro-war” and “anti-war,” certainly the former. None of us is pro-war. It’s just that some of us think that it’s necessary to wage, while others do not. The Bush side thinks the war is a matter of self-defense; the other side thinks it’s a matter of belligerence, or arrogance, or utopianism, or servitude to “Sharon,” or something else bad.
As I have said before, I wish this election weren’t so important. But I’m afraid it is. If the Americans elected John Kerry in, oh, 1992 or 1996, that would be one thing. If they elect him in 2004 � that will tell us something disheartening.
A little story: Some time ago, England had what was called “the Metric Martyr.” This was a fellow � a grocer or a butcher, I forget which � who sold his goods in imperial measures: pounds, ounces, etc. But because England is now beholden to Brussels, he was prosecuted for not using the metric system (hence, Metric Martyr).
I asked our senior editor David Pryce-Jones (a Brit), “How could the British people permit this? I mean, it’s their system � the imperial system, or the English system � to begin with.” David answered, “The British people wouldn’t permit it. The question is whether they remain the British people.”


(Nordlinger has some other godd stuff, including this gem from a reader: “Did you see that Fidel Castro took a fall? I wonder if Jimmy Carter broke his nose.”)
Roger Simon has a related point about how the anti-Israel, anti-democracy pro-status-quo “Arabists” have found their home in Kerry’s Democratic apparatus, as evidenced by Kerry’s top foreign policy adviser, Richard Holbrooke, specifying that a Kerry administration would put the screws on three countries in the region: Syria, Saudi Arabia and Israel. Krauthammer, if you missed his latest must-read column, explains how and why Kerry would sell out Israel, which remains our most unpopular ally among the Europeans, the UN, the Arab dictators and others whom Kerry feels the need to please.
Call me naive, but I still have more faith in the voters than that. But I remain worried that the election will be close enough to be swayed by fraud and litigation, and that’s bad news for Bush – and for the nation.

Lip

Yeah, Mike Lupica is just all class:

I’ve mentioned in the past, as a Boston College man, that if Notre Dame can’t hold up its end of this football rivalry, we’re going to have to drop them the way we did Holy Cross. But I was taught to be more generous than that at BC. So we’ll keep playing them, just as long as they understand something: We’re their daddy.


If you read the front end of the column, Lupica is laying the groundwork for his preferred storyline that blames everything on A-Rod, totally absolves Derek Jeter, and makes it out like the Yankees’ ability to import an endless line of superstars is somehow a burden they have to carry. Well, of course.

Explosive Charge

The NY Times – with the assistance, predictably, of 60 Minutes – is pushing a story about explosive stockpiles in Iraq that have been unaccounted for since the invasion. Why now? I’ll leave that to the reader. But the relevant questions about what’s missing from this story are asked by Captain Ed, Geraghty, the Minute Man, Henke, and John Cole.
UPDATE: Andrew McCarthy at NRO argues that the existence of the explosives in question constitute yet another example of Saddam’s violations of UN resolutions, one UN inspectors apparently decided to let slide because Saddam’s regime told them that the explosives could conceivably have non-military applications. And remember, this particular cache was just a small proportion of Saddam’s explosives stockpiles, in addition to all the other problems with his regime. Oh, but “the sanctions were working,” right?
ONE MORE UPDATE: Geraghty, who’s been on this story all day, quotes NBC News Pentagon reporter Jim Miklaszewski saying that the NBC News crew embedded with the 101st Airborne during the war confirms that the missing explosives were already gone when the 101st Airborne arrived at the site on April 10, 2003, the day after the fall of Baghdad. More here from what appears to be a contemporaneous report of what some parts of the 101st (recall that a division is more than 10,000 troops) was tasked with that day:

U.S. Army soldiers from the 101st Airborne Division began an offensive to root out the Fedayeen paramilitary fighters loyal to Saddam Hussein from Hillah.
The troops encountered resistance almost immediately on entering the city. About 200 Fedayeen fighters on pick-up trucks counter-attacked with machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades. Several Iraqi tanks also fired rounds at U.S. tanks.
U.S. forces responded with tank fire, artillery, and air strikes. Scores of Iraqi troops were killed during the four-hour battle. Three U.S. soldiers were wounded.
A lieutenant colonel with the 101st Airborne, Rick Carlson, says his soldiers, conducting a building-to-building search of the city, discovered what he called a “gigantic” warehouse full of weapons and ordnance.
Other weapons were found inside schools. He says the soldiers searched school buildings because that is where U.S. troops in neighboring cities of Najaf and Karbala have uncovered large weapons caches:
“Every school that we have encountered in those three regions has been used as a weapons depot. So, whenever we have gone into a (militarily) built-up area, we go straight to a school.”

Two Down, But Can The Sox Go?

Random Game Two thoughts:
*Speaking of Willis Reed (see below), during last night’s start by Curt Schilling, I thought back to some of the great or memorable performances by injured players: Reed, Kareem in Game 6 of the 1980 NBA Finals, Nolan Ryan pitching on a fractured ankle in Game 5 of the 1986 NLCS, Kirk Gibson’s home run in 1988. What most great performances like this have in common is, they’re one-day-only things. Schilling has pressed his luck twice, and there are real questions about whether he can go a third time.
*Tim McCarver said last night that Manny Ramirez is an “outstanding two-strike hitter.” Well, I don’t generally accept things like this on faith if they can be checked, especially concerning the two-strike hitting of a guy who struck out 124 times this year, so I looked at Manny’s numbers the last three years, from ESPN.com:

Count Avg Slg OBP OPS
0-2 .221 .372 .228 600
After 0-2 .217 .380 .250 630
1-2 .206 .381 .210 591
After 1-2 .221 .409 .283 692
2-2 .269 .469 .274 743
After 2-2 .261 .463 .375 838
3-2 .271 .508 .521 1029
2 Strikes .245 .440 .338 778
All .325 .613 .423 1036

The “Two Strikes” line adds up his 0-2, 1-2, 2-2 and 3-2 numbers. At first glance, Manny is a terrible two-strike hitter until he gets to 2-2, and only really good at 3-2. But nearly everyone is horrible on those counts; the fact that Manny slugs nearly .400 even on 0-2 and 1-2, .469 on 2-2 and over .500 on 3-2 is not bad at all, both absolutely and in comparison to his usual spectacular production. The average AL player batted .269/.431/.337 this season, but .195/.300/.266 with two strikes, a 26.3% dropoff in OPS; Manny falls off by 24.9% over a three year-period, which is visibly but not outstandingly better.
*Entering Game Three of the World Series, the Cardinals are 29-10 in postseason games at Busch Stadium since 1982, and 16-26 on the road; since 1996, the breakdown is 14-6 at home, 10-14 on the road.
*I wonder what Bill James thinks, being associated with a team that bats Orlando Cabrera second. Repeat: “I am just a consultant, I’m not the manager.”
*Are the Green Monster seats now officially the cool seats now that Hollywood stars like Tom Hanks sit in them?
*I liked the way Cal Eldred went high and outside after Ortiz’ foul homer; a lot of guys love to follow those up by jacking one out, and Eldred tried to get him to bite.
*Well, you get your bombs with Mark Bellhorn, and you get your boots. I still think he’s worth the tradeoff as compared to Pokey Reese.
*Unless I heard wrong, Joe Buck described Jason Marquis as being “infestive” in this postseason, but then again that sounds about right.
*Buck was also doing a way-premature Sox-finally-win-the-championship victory lap in the 7th, before two wins were in the books. The announcers seem to have forgotten about the Cardinals, even after they posted the best record in baseball and dominated the National League. Coming from a crew of one guy whose dad was the Voice of the Cardinals and one who played in three World Serieses for the Cards, that has to grate on St. Louis’ fans.

No Pepper

A doctor weighs in on what went wrong to cause a pepper spray projectile fired by Boston cops to kill a young woman celebrating the Red Sox’ ALCS victory.
UPDATE: My bad; I really just skimmed this before I linked to it, since the writer appears to have some useful knowledge on the subject, but I don’t necessarily endorse the implication some people have drawn from this that the Boston PD doesn’t deserve a good bit of the blame for this. I absolutely don’t think that the Boston PD should be let off the hook here, and I say that as a great believer in giving cops the benefit of the doubt in dealing with difficult situations. One of the first rules of policing is, either you shoot to kill or you don’t shoot. Projectiles like this shouldn’t be fired directly at people if there’s no reason to use deadly force.

The Big Story: A Fabricated UN Meeting

Powerline points us to the much-hyped story of the weekend, a Washington Times piece by National Review’s State Department correspondent, Joel Mowbray:

U.N. ambassadors from several nations are disputing assertions by Democratic presidential candidate Sen. John Kerry that he met for hours with all members of the U.N. Security Council just a week before voting in October 2002 to authorize the use of force in Iraq.
An investigation by The Washington Times reveals that while the candidate did talk for an unspecified period to at least a few members of the panel, no such meeting, as described by Mr. Kerry on a number of occasions over the past year, ever occurred.


This contradicts Kerry’s assertion at the second presidential debate that he had such a meeting:

This president hasn’t listened. I went to meet with the members of the Security Council in the week before we voted. I went to New York. I talked to all of them, to find out how serious they were about really holding Saddam Hussein accountable.


Kerry was even more emphatic in one of his big prepared foreign policy speeches:

Speaking before the Council on Foreign Relations in New York in December 2003, Mr. Kerry explained that he understood the “real readiness” of the United Nations to “take this seriously” because he met “with the entire Security Council, and we spent a couple of hours talking about what they saw as the path to a united front in order to be able to deal with Saddam Hussein.”


Kerry is now backing down:

When reached for comment last week, an official with the Kerry campaign stood by the candidate’s previous claims that he had met with the entire Security Council.
But after being told late yesterday of the results of The Times investigation, the Kerry campaign issued a statement that read in part, “It was a closed meeting and a private discussion.”
A Kerry aide refused to identify who participated in the meeting.
The statement did not repeat Mr. Kerry’s claims of a lengthy meeting with the entire 15-member Security Council, instead saying the candidate “met with a group of representatives of countries sitting on the Security Council.”
Asked whether the international body had any records of Mr. Kerry sitting down with the whole council, a U.N. spokesman said that “our office does not have any record of this meeting.”


Great work by the bloggers who got this story rolling and by Mowbray for putting it all together. What does it all mean? This is a lot bigger deal, at a minimum, than Dick Cheney forgetting that he’d ever run into John Edwards; the problem with some of Kerry’s fabrications is that they tend to be complicated, self-important embellishments that are hard to square with a simple trick of memory. That’s how Roger Simon, who compares this to the “Christmas in Cambodia” fairytale, views the story. Jason Steffens is less impressed with the electoral significance of yet another “Kerry made stuff up” story, as apparently are some of Simon’s readers.
I doubt myself that this will be a game-breaker, but then, anything that puts Kerry on the defensive for even a day at this late stage can be a big momentum-suck, and this is a legitimate question, and one that Kerry would have to answer if we had a press corps that demanded answers from Kerry, which it often has not. Of course, the ultimate test is whether other news agencies will pick up this story – as they would if it were a claim that Bush had lied and ran on CBS or ABC or in the New York Times – or if this will get buried in the right-wing media ghetto. This morning’s Drudge Report is not encouraging: there’s a small headline, totally eclipsed by the blaring coverage of Bill Clinton’s triumphant, press-oxygen-sucking return to the campaign. We know which story Big Media would rather cover; Matt Lauer last week was worshipfully comparing a Clinton return to Willis Reed hobbling onto the court in the 1970 NBA Finals (which is a humorous analogy because it puts Kerry in the Clyde Frazier role). Stay tuned.
UPDATE: INDC Journal has more, including links to other commentary. Bill also considers a possible justification:

A commenter brings up a reasonable point – Kerry “meant to communicate” that he only met with the permanent members of the Security Council, not “all of them,” as he specified on two occasions. I don’t believe that this interpretation completely invalidates the significance of Kerry’s statements, but in any case, I’ve been told that verification regarding the permanent five is in the works. We’ll see. I await further detail with everyone else.


Captain Ed finds this unhelpful and telling of Kerry’s attitude towards our allies in Eastern Europe:

[T]he reality of his paltry and meaningless diplomacy also shows what a lightweight Kerry is on the world stage. He went to the UN to meet with diplomats about Iraq, and who did he choose? Singapore, Cameroon, and France: two countries that could have no earthly effect on enforcing the UN resolutions, and one that Saddam had bribed into submission. He didn’t bother with Bulgaria, one of the nations that Bush convinced to support the liberation of Iraq and one with troops on the ground helping to support its democratization.

Why I’m Voting for Bush

Above all, we are at war. This will be the first Presidential election since the September 11, 2001 attacks, which nearly killed the primary author of this site and which claimed the lives of almost 3,000 innocent Americans whose only offense was going to work or getting on a plane in a free country. It is essential that we never forget that day and that we affirm our commitment to seeing the War on Terror through. President Bush is the best candidate to do so and offers the best plan to lead this country for the next four years.
I am not a blind supporter of the President. Were there a George Washington or Winston Churchill running against Bush, I?d be quite happy to vote to replace him. In fact, in 2000, I supported John McCain and that year, as John Kerry might say, I voted against Bush before I voted for him. But, over the last four years, I believe Bush has been an excellent wartime leader and that there is simply no credible alternative offered in this election.

Continue reading Why I’m Voting for Bush