TRAIL MIX: JOHN EDWARDS' BAD DAY, PART II. A long wowser of a story on John Edwards just came across the wires:

While a member of Congress' investigation into U.S. and Saudi intelligence failures, presidential hopeful John Edwards agreed to sell his home for $3.52 million to the public relations expert hired by Saudi Arabia to counter charges it was soft on terrorism.

Edwards, a Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said Friday he learned sometime during the course of the 2002 transaction -- months after the initial offer was signed but before the deal fell apart -- that Michael Petruzzello worked for Saudi Arabia.

Though the sale broke off nearly a year ago, Edwards hasn't returned or publicly disclosed Petruzzello's $100,000 deposit, which remains in a real estate escrow account as the senator decides what to do with it. Edwards recently sold the house to another buyer for a half-million dollars less than Petruzzello's offer.

"If I took control of the $100,000, I would disclose it because that would be an asset of mine and it would be necessary that it should be disclosed. And that disclosure would include making sure that it was appropriate because of the legal issues associated it with it," Edwards told The Associated Press.

The Senate ethics manual says lawmakers are obligated to avoid financial transactions that create even the "possibility or appearance" of a conflict of interest or if "they have personal financial stakes in the outcome of their official duties." Discretion is left to the senator.

Edwards said he handled the transaction through real estate agents and doesn't believe he had any obligation to try to learn about Petruzzello's clients. He said he never had any suspicions, even after learning of the Saudi connection while he and other Intelligence Committee members were still investigating Saudi Arabia's possible complicity in the Sept. 11 attacks.

"This guy never said anything to me about Saudi Arabia," Edwards said, noting he was critical of the Saudis both before and after the house deal. "So it is an arms length transaction with a stranger, and he ends up backing out of the deal, which created a financial loss for us."

Petruzzello, a registered foreign agent for Saudi Arabia since shortly after Sept. 11, said his offer had nothing to do with the Saudis. "My wife loved it (the house), and I just wanted to make her happy," he said.

Several ethics experts who reviewed the transaction at the request of AP said they believed Edwards had an obligation to recognize the appearance of a conflict of interest once he learned of the Saudi connection, either disclosing the transaction or seeking Senate Ethics Committee clearance.

"The potential conflict of interest is readily apparent when a member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence receives $100,000 in a real or sham business deal with a foreign agent or a person with extensive foreign contracts at the same time the Senate is investigating possible lapses in national security," said Kent Cooper, the former head of government's public disclosure office for federal candidates.

I'm not sure I can even count the number of ways all this knocks Edwards off-message. But, boy, is this not the kind of story you want if your narrative is that you're a working-class-friendly opponent of lobbyists who's tough on national security issues.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

TRAIL MIX: CLARK TAKES THE LEAD IN S.C. This is a big deal -- both for John Edwards, though in a bad way, and for Wesley Clark, who had gone down in several other polls and needed a news boost. Over the past three weeks, Clark has rocketed up to the front of the pack in South Carolina, with 17 percent support, according to a new American Research Group poll. Edwards has spent $600,000 in ads in the state, but only reached 16 percent support in this poll before dropping back to his current 10 percent. Meanwhile Clark, who has only just begun to fight, has lept ahead of him without any advertising at all. Joe Lieberman, Dick Gephardt and Howard Dean were bunched in statistical third in South Carolina, with 8 percent and 7 percent support.

This means we now have polls showing Clark in the lead in South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, California (PDF File), Illinois (among those closely following the race), Wisconsin and nationwide. He's in second place in Arizona and third in New York, where Dean leads. Dean also leads in New Hampshire, Maryland, Michigan, New Mexico (though this was a pre-Clark poll) and some polls nationwide. He is tied with or in second to Gephardt in Iowa. Gephardt leads in Illinois.

Kerry does not lead anywhere that I've seen -- and if you've seen such a poll, feel free to tell me about it -- though he is in second in New Hampshire. South Carolina was the only state where Edwards was in better than third place. Lieberman is still running a strong second in some states, and leads in Connecticut.

What does all this mean? First, some caveats: the results of each primary or caucus will impact the results of the ones to follow, tough campaigning will knock candidates out of their narrow leads in some states, substantial percentages of voters remain undecided, and there are four months to go before some of these contests take place. So a lot can and will happen.

That said, it's hard not to draw the conclusion from these state polls that Clark is the only one of the candidates banking on making his first strong showing in the Feb. 3 and later primary states who currently looks well positioned to do so, even if he does not yet have state infrastructures and boots on the ground.

There's been a lot of chatter in D.C. recently about how the air is going out of the Clark campaign, how Clark is melting, and so on. Even from some of Clark's most ardent supporters.

I'm not certain I buy this yet.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

UP THE MEMORY HOLE. You may remember how the Justice Department finally released, more than a year after its completion, a consulting company's appraisal of the department's hiring practices and workforce diversity -- only to redact it more heavily than anything that's come out the administration so far. The Memory Hole, an excellent Web site that I discovered via Atrios, has posted the unredacted version. (Here's The New York Times article about the report and the deleted passages.) You can't cut and paste from the redacted parts even though they're readable, so go and check it out for yourself. It's about what you'd expect.

--Nick Confessore

A MUST-READ SPEECH. Make sure to check out the transcript -- now posted at TAP Online -- of Zbigniew Brzezinski's remarkable talk to the "New American Strategies for Security and Peace" conference earlier this week.

--TAP Online

FRIVOLOUS LAWSUITS. We all know that conservative opposition to frivolous lawsuits is somewhat ill-at-ease with Rupert Murdoch's penchant for taking legal action against his critics, but this is a bit ridiculous:

According to [Simpsons creator Matt] Groening, Fox took exception [to] a Simpsons' version of the Fox News rolling news ticker which parodied the channel's anti-Democrat stance, with headlines like "Do Democrats Cause Cancer?"

"Fox fought against it and said they would sue the show," Groening said.

"We called their bluff because we didn't think Rupert Murdoch would pay for Fox to sue itself. So, we got away with it."

Sometimes, you've just got to laugh.

--Matthew Yglesias

CELL DIVISION. It's an extraordinary thing to watch Michael Kinsley, master of the bemused-but-devastating takedown, leaven his evisceratory talents with a helping of cold fury. Here, in Slate, is Kinsley responding to Bush advisor Jay Lefkowitz's weak response to Kinsley's recent column on the president's stem-cell policy.

--Nick Confessore

BLAME BILL CLINTON. Taking a page from Rich Lowry's book, Condoleezza Rice took some time out of her busy schedule yesterday to blame Bill Clinton for the 9-11 attacks. As I've said before, hindsight pretty clearly reveals that the Clinton administration's approach to this issue had some flaws, but all indications are that in its early months, the Bush administration made things worse, not better. The New York Times' David Sanger makes some of the key points in his article on the Rice speech:

Ms. Rice's comments make no reference to what the Bush administration itself did between Mr. Bush's inauguration on Jan. 20, 2001, and the Sept. 11 attacks.

In the past she has said that a detailed plan to counter Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups was on her desk, approved, when the attacks occurred. That plan became the basis for the decision to drive Al Qaeda out of Afghanistan and topple the Taliban.

But Mr. Bush himself made little reference to the threat of Al Qaeda, the need to topple the Taliban or other terrorism-related issues prior to the Sept. 11. attacks.

Rice seems to think that the counterterrorism plan "on her desk" on 9-11 counts as exculpatory evidence regarding the Bush administration's policies on this score, but a closer look shows that it doesn't. Give this Washington Post article a read and you'll see what I mean:

Work began in the Counterterrorism Strategy Group, or CSG, by the first week of February. There it stayed for months.

"The U.S. government can only manage at the highest level a certain number of issues at one time – two or three," said Michael Sheehan, the State Department's former coordinator for counterterrorism. "You can't get to the principals on any other issue. That's in any administration."

Before Sept. 11, terrorism did not make that cut.

Army Lt. Gen. Donald Kerrick, who had come from top posts on the Joint Staff and the Defense Intelligence Agency to manage Clinton's National Security Council staff, remained at the NSC nearly four months after Bush took office.

He noticed a difference on terrorism. Clinton's Cabinet advisers, burning with the urgency of their losses to bin Laden in the African embassy bombings in 1998 and the Cole attack in 2000, had met "nearly weekly" to direct the fight, Kerrick said. Among Bush's first-line advisers, "candidly speaking, I didn't detect" that kind of focus, he said. "That's not being derogatory. It's just a fact. I didn't detect any activity but what [Clinton and Bush counterterrorism chief] Dick Clarke and the CSG were doing."

Long story short, if Rice and Bush had cared to pay attention to terrorism, this plan could have been put into action, rather than sitting on her desk on 9-11. Instead we got a lot of attention to missile defense, which would be a good counterterrorism program if terrorists had ballistic missiles and if missile-defense technology worked. Since they don't and it doesn't, that strategy hasn't been a big help. There's really not much more to say about this beyond what I wrote in my response to Lowry. It doesn't make sense to play a blame game that does strikingly little to help us understand the real issues, but if conservatives insist on doing it, then on the merits at least, they ought to lose.

--Matthew Yglesias

ALL IS WELL ON THE EASTERN FRONT, COMRADE. FOX News has already hit hard against Charlie Reina, the former FOX producer whose letter to Jim Romenesko's site has provoked so much discussion about the station's legitimacy as a news operation. (Here's my take.) Now Sharri Berg, FOX News Channel's vice president for news operations, has trashed her former colleague in the same forum:

Like any former, disgruntled employee, Charlie Reina has an ax to grind. He was employed at Fox News Channel for six years as the Producer of NewsWatch and of many different specials, including shows on MLK, Robert F. Kennedy, John Glenn and Newt Gingrich. During that entire period, we were unaware that anyone at Fox News was holding a metaphorical gun to his head.

Earlier this year, Mr. Reina objected to an adjustment in his assigned duties -- duties which he was qualified to perform and paid to do. That very inaction is what affects morale and sends the wrong message to the entire newsroom. If you asked any of the people he refered to as "grunts" but we refer to as "producers," "writers," "desk assistants," they resent his characterization. One of them said this morning, "Charlie actually NEVER had a job in the newsroom. He worked out of some space up on 17 or 18 reserved for overpaid feature producers on career life support. The 'grunts' knew him mainly as one of any number of clueless feature producers who would call the desk at random and ask 'do we have...' The kind of calls where after you hang up you say to the phone 'go f-k yourself.' In fact, its not editorial policy that pisses off newsroom grunts -- its people like Charlie."

How could Mr. Reina have worked at this company for six years if the picture he paints of life at Fox News is true?

Mr. Reina's premise about "the memo" is unfounded. People are proud to work here. They are proud of the product we produce and understand our daily and future goals. Among many, many others, Mr. Reina's memo has a glaring omission, in that Fox News Channel has a very low turnover rate and very high morale. In other words, people who work here WANT to work here.

Notice that Berg does not dispute a single fact in Reina's letter. She simply asserts that, in fact, FOX employees have high morale and are a very happy bunch indeed. But if FOX employees are so peachy-keen, why aren't they writing into MediaNews? Surely they would stick up for their network, if Reina was really so wrong. Instead, Berg -- after dismissing Reina, predictably, as "disgruntled" -- quotes an anonymous FOX employee bad-mouthing Reina as an overpaid time-server. Does Berg -- or anyone else in the company's management -- know about all those do-nothings on the 17th and 18th floors?

For more insider dish on life at FOX, see Salon's excellent Q-and-A with Reina.

--Nick Confessore

FIGHTING THE LAST WAR. I find myself wondering whether U.S. casualties count as "progress" in Afghanistan or if that's a special feature of the Iraq conflict. If so, we must be doing pretty well, as a soldier died early this morning following the deaths of two CIA operatives over the weekend. Certainly the White House can't blame the deteriorating situation over there on a hostile press corps, since the media's been in ignore-Afghanistan-mode for almost as long as the president. Blogger and Islamic history student Brian Ulrich has a couple of recent posts on the subject (here and here) with links to stories about the country's burgeoning opium trade and resurgent Taliban military forces.

Several speakers at the New American Strategies conference analogized the administration's counterterrorism policies to those "whack-a-mole" games, where each time a mole pops its head up you whack it down, only to see it pop up again soon enough. On 9-11 we learned that letting the Taliban gain control of a large swath of Afghanistan was a serious mistake, and now we seem to be in danger of letting it happen again.

--Matthew Yglesias

THE REAL RONALD REAGAN. Lately, a number of conservatives have been protesting the supposedly inaccurate and unfair portrayal of Ronald Reagan in the new CBS miniseries, The Reagans. I note that not many of those same conservatives objected when Showtime aired a movie, DC 9/11: Time of Crisis, that depicted President Bush and his administration in an inaccurate manner. (As one reviewer wrote when the film aired in September, the movie "patently tries to mythologize Bush.") Nevertheless, the accuracy of Reagan's portrayal by CBS is indeed a cause for concern, and Reagan's defenders will certainly be glad to see that Rep. John Dingell (D-Mich.) is on the case. In a letter to CBS, Dingell writes:

I write to you with regard to your upcoming mini-series "The Reagans." I share the concerns expressed by others that it may not present an accurate depiction of the Reagan administration and America during the 1980s. I trust that CBS will not be a party to a distorted presentation of American history, and that the mini-series will present a fair and balanced portrayal of the Reagans, the 1980s and their legacy.

As someone who served with President Reagan, and in the interest of historical accuracy, please allow me to share with you some of my recollections of the Reagan years that I hope will make it into the final cut of the mini-series: $640 Pentagon toilets seats; ketchup as a vegetable; union busting; firing striking air traffic controllers; Iran-Contra; selling arms to terrorist nations; trading arms for hostages; retreating from terrorists in Beirut; lying to Congress; financing an illegal war in Nicaragua; visiting Bitburg cemetery; a cozy relationship with Saddam Hussein; shredding documents; Ed Meese; Fawn Hall; Oliver North; James Watt; apartheid apologia; the savings and loan scandal; voodoo economics; record budget deficits; double digit unemployment; farm bankruptcies; trade deficits; astrologers in the White House; Star Wars; and influence peddling.

I hope you find these facts useful in accurately depicting President Reagan's time in office.

That should be a big help to the folks at CBS.

--Nick Confessore

TRAIL MIX: AND WHILE I'M ON THE SUBJECT OF SHARPTON. Over the past couple of days I've talked to several people who thought that Sharpton, in the second Congressional Black Caucus debate in Detroit on Sunday, was flirting with a kind of demagoguery he's excelled at in years past, when he turned a question about politics and religion into a pointed query to Joe Lieberman:

SHARPTON: We were the ones that worked with Saddam Hussein. The United States worked with bin Laden. I went in 2001 and met with Arafat at the insistence of the Israeli foreign minister. Would anyone here meet with Arafat, in terms of trying to get peace in the Middle East?

Let's put the hard questions out, Senator Lieberman. Would you meet with the head of the Palestinian Authority? (APPLAUSE)

In answer to your question, I think that Boykin's statement is wrong. This is not about one religion against another. It's about right versus wrong.

I said it earlier when we were talking about right to choose, one of the reasons I'm glad to be in this race is we're going to have the battle between the Christian right and the right Christians. (APPLAUSE)

IFILL: Senator Lieberman, you've got 30 seconds to . . . (APPLAUSE)

. . . you can hardly hear me -- Senator Lieberman, you've got 30 seconds to respond to Reverend Sharpton's statement. (APPLAUSE)

Senator Lieberman?

As someone who is clearly not one of the "right Christians," Lieberman seemed briefly stunned by the tone of the questioning. The applause that followed Sharpton's demand seemed unpleasantly enthusiastic. Lieberman didn't make an issue of it, but something about what Sharpton said struck me the wrong way. It reminded me of how, when I'd met with an ardent Sharpton supporter last December to get a tape of a Sharpton speech, he wanted to know if I was Jewish before he'd talk to me.

Sharpton has a long and unpleasant history with the Jewish community in New York, but in recent years he has been smart enough not to cross any obvious lines. Still, the Sharpton-Lieberman relationship will be one that bears watching.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

GROWING PAINS. While The Note wonders how the Democratic candidates will handle today's very good news on the GDP front, I think The Corner had the answer this morning:

Obviously, the Democratic presidential contenders will -- fairly -- call attention to the lackluster job growth. But how long can jobs lag behind?

As long as the unemployment rate stays steady and incomes stagnate, it's hard to see the president gaining a great deal of political advantage from improved output numbers. But will strong growth lead inevitably to an improved job market? Berkeley economist Brad DeLong says maybe yes, maybe no:

How can such strong output growth coexist with such lousy employment news? It is this year's great economic data mystery. Everyone believes that it cannot last. Either (i) firms will find themselves unable to meet rapidly-growing demand with their current labor force, and will start hiring at a furious pace, rapidly expanding employment; or (ii) households will take a look at their less-than-certain employment prospects, cut back on spending, and the pace of demand growth will slow drastically.

Current forecasts are smack in the middle: predictions of output growth at an annual rate of between 3.5% and 4.0% per year over the next year and a half or so, coupled with employment growth of perhaps 125,000 a month on average--enough to keep the unemployment rate from rising, but not enough to make unemployment fall.

However, the longer the disjunction between fast output growth and stagnant employment continues, the less likely this smack-in-the-middle forecast becomes. Things are very likely to be either significantly better or significantly worse than the current consensus forecast--but we have no idea which.

I'm not partisan enough to hope people stay unemployed just because that would make it easier to remove from office a president I dislike, but it's also worth pointing out that an improved economy hardly guarantees Bush's re-election, something Al Gore could probably tell us all about. On the domestic front, Democrats still have the old reliables of health care and education, and it's unlikely that anyone outside the White House will view today's string of attacks in Iraq as a further sign that the administration's reconstruction policy is succeeding. If Bush manages to resolve the country's foreign-policy problems and its economic problems, then, of course, his campaign is going to be in good shape -- but, frankly, there are worse scenarios one could imagine than GOP political success fueled by a return to peace and prosperity.

--Matthew Yglesias

TRAIL MIX: SHARPTON IS UP TO HIS OLD TRICKS -- AGAIN. The Rev. Al Sharpton has thrice revinvented himself during runs for office, and each time he has reverted to playing the race card by the time all was said and done. Last January, New York Democrats warned that it would only be a matter of time after Sharpton entered the Democratic presidential contest before he did what he has done in the past: Set his sights on the leader -- or whichever candidate appears to be most liberal -- and attack that person on racial grounds. That time has now arrived.

Tuesday, Sharpton's campaign sent out a furious press release attacking Howard Dean as having an "anti-black agenda" for being pro-death penalty (in some cases); against some federal gun-control laws (though, as The Washington Post has noted, his position on gun control is more rhetorically than substantively different from those of his rivals); and in favor of class-based affirmative action. Dean's campaign quickly parried, and Rep. Major Owens (D-N.Y.), Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. (D-Ill.) and consultant Donna Brazile all rushed to Dean's defense.

This attack needs some background, because it is the second salvo in what is likely to be an increasingly bloody and personal attack on Dean from Sharpton. (The first salvo came in September, when Sharpton called the Michigan Democratic Party's proposal to allow Internet voting in addition to regular polls "a racially biased proposal," and wrote to Dean, urging him to oppose the state party's move.)

Sharpton's campaign strategy -- and yes, he has one -- involves winning the non-binding Jan. 13 primary in D.C. and then winning the Feb. 3 South Carolina primary. The Dean campaign has devoted a great deal of effort to building support in D.C. -- it hopes to use it to build momentum heading into Iowa -- and has locked up many of the major endorsements from local political figures. For Sharpton to build the momentum he seeks -- and become a force within the Democratic Party at the level he would like to be -- he will need to win D.C. and at least one other primary contest, as Rev. Jesse Jackson did in 1984, when he won D.C. and Louisiana. "You mark my words, we're going to win D.C. and South Carolina," says Sharpton's deputy campaign director for D.C., Andre Johnson. "We're going to shock a lot of people."

Jackson won the D.C. primary both times he ran for president. Already, according to a nationwide Gallup poll, Sharpton is leading the field among African-American Democratic voters, with 22 percent support, to Clark's 13 percent and Dean's 8 percent. Up to 40 percent of voters in the South Carolina primary are expected to be African American. Sharpton's aides say he plans to launch a massive voter registration drive in South Carolina and give the state increased attention over the next three months.

But if Sharpton loses D.C., it's unlikely he'll win support anywhere.

The blast at Dean is also the latest piece of evidence suggesting that Sharpton is reaching the point in his campaign where he's decided to drop the gracious unifier act that has served him so well thus far, allowing him to become a favorite of Democratic debate audiences.

One of Sharpton's greatest weaknesses as an individual -- a failing that has kept him from becoming the sort of leader he aspires to be -- is that, for him, the political is always personal. That means it's unlikely that we've heard the last from him on the subject of Dean and race. A number of Dean's key advisers worked in 2001 for Mark Green, the Democratic mayoral candidate in New York City, during his acrimonious and racially charged primary face-off with Sharpton friend and Bronx Borough President Fernando Ferrer. Sharpton played a very divisive role in that race and eventually helped throw the general election contest to Republican Michael Bloomberg.

Sharpton's most recent attack on Dean was in reaction to reports that Jesse Jackson Jr. said he'd be endorsing Dean soon. Dean "doesn't put his finger in the air to test the wind before he takes a stand," Jackson spokesman Frank Watkins said, according to The Associated Press.

Watkins was, until recently, Sharpton's campaign manager. Earlier this month, Sharpton told MSNBC's Tom Llamas he smelled a "rat" in his campaign; Watkins abruptly left the Sharpton campaign, returning to the post he had held for seven years with Jackson Jr. Sharpton, in a press release, has now gone after Jackson Jr., as well as Dean: "Any so-called African American leader that would endorse Dean despite his anti-black record is mortgaging the future of our struggle for civil rights and social justice to back a candidate whose record on issues of critical importance to us is no better than that of George W. Bush. . . .[W]e have to overcome those in our community who would sell our priorities down the river in the name of political expediency."

If the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) endorses Dean, as some are anticipating, that could further rankle Sharpton. SEIU Local 1199 head Dennis Rivera and Sharpton go way back; they spent time in jail together after protesting at a military base in Vieques, Puerto Rico.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

TRAIL MIX: WELCOME TO THE UGLY SEASON. Joe Lieberman accuses a John Kerry campaigner of telling Arizona officials to not endorse Lieberman because he is a religious Jew who can't campaign seven days a week. (Kerry severed his relationship with the man in question.) Howard Dean accuses a Dick Gephardt staffer of calling a Dean supporter a "faggot." Al Sharpton accuses Dean of having an "anti-black" agenda. Sen. Zell Miller (D-Ga.) endorses Bush.

It'll just get worse from here.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

SEE FOR YOURSELF. The coverage of Tuesday's White House press conference in The New York Times (here) and The Washington Post (here) really failed to do justice to what took place. The president's answers were by turns off-point, dishonest and nonsensical -- read the transcript and see for yourself. The Center for American Progress put out a release detailing some of Bush's more factually-challenged claims, but it didn't do anything on my hobbyhorse, Valerie Plame, so check out this exchange:

Q: Thank you, Mr. President. You have said that you are eager to find out whether somebody in the White House leaked the identity of an undercover CIA agent. Many experts in such investigations say you can find if there was a leaker in the White House within hours if you asked all staff members to sign affidavits denying involvement. Why not take that step?

THE PRESIDENT: Well, the best person to that, Dana, so that the -- or the best group of people to do that so that you believe the answer is the professionals at the Justice Department. And they're moving forward with the investigation. It's a criminal investigation. It is an important investigation. I'd like to know if somebody in my White House did leak sensitive information. As you know, I've been outspoken on leaks. And whether they happened in the White House, or happened in the administration, or happened on Capitol Hill, it is a -- they can be very damaging.

And so this investigation is ongoing and -- by professionals who do this for a living, and I hope they -- I'd like to know.

I don't know what that's supposed to mean, and I certainly don't know what it has to do with the question, but it's pretty clear that the president doesn't have a good answer. Of course, dodging questions isn't exactly unprecedented in politics and you can read Scott McClellan doing it almost every day here, but unlike his press secretary, the president doesn't need to hold these events if he doesn't want to answer questions.

--Matthew Yglesias

HOW TO FOOL MOST OF THE PEOPLE MOST OF THE TIME. Alternet's Kenny Ausubel had a great story up last week that I only came across now. It's about a briefing book -- written by Republican pollster Frank Luntz and obtained by the Environmental Working Group -- on how GOP politicians can talk like they are pro-environment when in reality they are anti-environment.

The PR headline is: "The Environment: A Cleaner, Safer, Healthier Future." Here are a few of the eight key messages in Luntz's briefing book for Republicans:

Number One: First assure your audience that you're committed to "preserving and protecting" the environment, but that "it can be done more wisely and effectively." Since many Americans believe Republicans do not care about the environment, you will never convince people to accept your ideas until you confront this suspicion and put it to rest. Absolutely do not raise economic arguments first.

Number Two: Provide specific examples of federal bureaucrats failing to meet their responsibilities to protect the environment.

Number Three: Your plan must be put in terms of the future, not the past or present. The environment is an area where people expect progress, and when they do not see progress, they become frustrated.

Number Six: If you must use the economic argument, stress that you are seeking "a fair balance" between the environment and the economy. Be prepared to specify and quantify the jobs lost because of needless, excessive or redundant regulations.

Number Eight: Emphasize common sense. In making regulatory decisions, we should use our best estimates and realistic assumptions, not the worst-case scenarios advanced by environmental extremists.

To fight off the ingrained bad-guy image, Luntz cuts to the chase:

"Indeed it can be helpful to think of environmental and other issues in terms of 'story.' A compelling story, even if factually inaccurate, can be more emotionally compelling than a dry recitation of the truth... The facts are beside the point. It's all in how you frame your argument."

"The facts are beside the point." This reminds me of Luntz's advice for President Bush on global warming. In a memo also obtained by the Environmental Working Group -- hey, where are the professional reporters on this stuff? -- Luntz instructed that the "scientific debate is closing [against us] but not yet closed. There is still a window of opportunity to challenge the science." Facts? Science? Who needs 'em?

As my friend Josh Green once pointed out in this excellent article:

Bush's approach to polling is the opposite of [Bill] Clinton's. He uses polls but conceals that fact, and, instead of polling to ensure that new policies have broad public support, takes policies favored by his conservative base and polls on how to make them seem palatable to mainstream voters.

This goes double on environmental issues, where the public has little taste for the GOP agenda.

--Nick Confessore

TOUCHY, TOUCHY. Taking a page from Bill O'Reilly, NRO's dedicated Krugman-basher Donald Luskin seems to be threatening to sue Atrios over some allegedly libelous things posted in the comments section of his blog. It seems that the goal here isn't so much to win a lawsuit as it is to use a lawsuit as a pretext for subpoenaing Atrios' real name. The potential for a chilling effect on blog comment sections and pseudonymous blogging here is fairly obvious.

--Matthew Yglesias

THE SMOKING GUN? Personally, I've always been surprised that no reporter has ever tried to do a real story on life inside FOX News. The place's output is obviously slanted, and no one except Roger Ailes -- heck, probably not even him -- actually takes seriously FOX's claim of fairness and balance. So I've always wondered what kind of internal culture produces that output. Charles Pierce, who once toiled in Rupert Murdoch's empire, gave us a glimpse in this excellent Salon story a year or so ago, in which he argued that the media baron creates in all his properties a counterculture laced with tabloid values and a faux working-class bonhomie. But now, in a letter to Jim Romenesko's invaluable site, Charlie Reina, who for six years was a FOX News producer, tells us much more about how the place actually operates day-to-day. It's rather extraordinary, and worth posting in full:

So Chris Wallace says Fox News Channel really is fair and balanced. Well, I guess that settles it. We can all go home now. I mean, so what if Wallace's salary as Fox's newest big-name anchor ends with a whole lot of zeroes? So what if he hasn't spent a day in the FNC newsroom yet?

My advice to the pundits: If you really want to know about bias at Fox, talk to the grunts who work there -- the desk assistants, tape editors, writers, researchers and assorted producers who have to deal with it every day. Ask enough of them what goes on, promise them anonymity, and you'll get the real story.

The fact is, daily life at FNC is all about management politics. I say this having served six years there -- as producer of the media criticism show, News Watch, as a writer/producer of specials and (for the last year of my stay) as a newsroom copy editor. Not once in the 20+ years I had worked in broadcast journalism prior to Fox -- including lengthy stays at The Associated Press, CBS Radio and ABC/Good Morning America -- did I feel any pressure to toe a management line. But at Fox, if my boss wasn't warning me to "be careful" how I handled the writing of a special about Ronald Reagan ("You know how Roger [Fox News Chairman Ailes] feels about him."), he was telling me how the environmental special I was to produce should lean ("You can give both sides, but make sure the pro-environmentalists don't get the last word.")

Editorially, the FNC newsroom is under the constant control and vigilance of management. The pressure ranges from subtle to direct. First of all, it's a news network run by one of the most high-profile political operatives of recent times. Everyone there understands that FNC is, to a large extent, "Roger's Revenge" - against what he considers a liberal, pro-Democrat media establishment that has shunned him for decades. For the staffers, many of whom are too young to have come up through the ranks of objective journalism, and all of whom are non-union, with no protections regarding what they can be made to do, there is undue motivation to please the big boss.

Sometimes, this eagerness to serve Fox's ideological interests goes even beyond what management expects. For example, in June of last year, when a California judge ruled the Pledge of Allegiance's "Under God" wording unconstitutional, FNC's newsroom chief ordered the judge's mailing address and phone number put on the screen. The anchor, reading from the Teleprompter, found himself explaining that Fox was taking this unusual step so viewers could go directly to the judge and get "as much information as possible" about his decision. To their credit, the big bosses recognized that their underling's transparent attempt to serve their political interests might well threaten the judge's physical safety and ordered the offending information removed from the screen as soon as they saw it. A few months later, this same eager-to-please newsroom chief ordered the removal of a graphic quoting UN weapons inspector Hans Blix as saying his team had not yet found WMDs in Iraq. Fortunately, the electronic equipment was quicker on the uptake (and less susceptible to office politics) than the toady and displayed the graphic before his order could be obeyed.

But the roots of FNC's day-to-day on-air bias are actual and direct. They come in the form of an executive memo distributed electronically each morning, addressing what stories will be covered and, often, suggesting how they should be covered. To the newsroom personnel responsible for the channel's daytime programming, The Memo is the bible. If, on any given day, you notice that the Fox anchors seem to be trying to drive a particular point home, you can bet The Memo is behind it.

The Memo was born with the Bush administration, early in 2001, and, intentionally or not, has ensured that the administration's point of view consistently comes across on FNC. This year, of course, the war in Iraq became a constant subject of The Memo. But along with the obvious -- information on who is where and what they'll be covering -- there have been subtle hints as to the tone of the anchors' copy. For instance, from the March 20th memo: "There is something utterly incomprehensible about Kofi Annan's remarks in which he allows that his thoughts are 'with the Iraqi people.' One could ask where those thoughts were during the 23 years Saddam Hussein was brutalizing those same Iraqis. Food for thought." Can there be any doubt that the memo was offering not only "food for thought," but a direction for the FNC writers and anchors to go? Especially after describing the U.N. Secretary General's remarks as "utterly incomprehensible"?

The sad truth is, such subtlety is often all it takes to send Fox's newsroom personnel into action -- or inaction, as the case may be. One day this past spring, just after the U.S. invaded Iraq, The Memo warned us that anti-war protesters would be "whining" about U.S. bombs killing Iraqi civilians, and suggested they could tell that to the families of American soldiers dying there. Editing copy that morning, I was not surprised when an eager young producer killed a correspondent's report on the day's fighting -- simply because it included a brief shot of children in an Iraqi hospital.

These are not isolated incidents at Fox News Channel, where virtually no one of authority in the newsroom makes a move unmeasured against management's politics, actual or perceived. At the Fair and Balanced network, everyone knows management's point of view, and, in case they're not sure how to get it on air, The Memo is there to remind them.

It's worth noting that this is far more excessive than the kind of behavior usually pinned on the so-called "liberal" media, where the putative bias is often explained as a consequence of subtle groupthink and reporters allowing their personal beliefs to influence how they pick stories and decide what to report. This is actually management handing down, in writing, not just the stories of the day, but how they will be covered -- and creating a newsroom culture where employees know the way to get ahead is to cater to Ailes' conservative beliefs.

It seems only yesterday that Ailes was lecturing the rest of the media about politics in the newsroom, telling Broadcasting & Cable:

When the editor of the LA Times sends a memo to his desk, which basically says, 'I know we're all liberals, but shouldn't we be a little more fair and balanced about this issue', that memo gets leaked. Well, in 50 years of journalism, they never thought to be fair and balanced before we get on the scene.

What a nice counterpoint. While Los Angeles Times editor John Carroll is sending memos to his staffers cautioning them not to push a liberal agenda in the news pages, Ailes is sending daily memos to his staffers urging them to push the Republican agenda as hard as they can.

Bonus homework assignment: Everybody go read Jacob Weisberg's seminal Slate piece on the "Conintern." If anything, it's even more relevant now than it was when he wrote it.

--Nick Confessore

ROTTEN LIBERALS? Jonah Goldberg is very upset with the Democrats who voted against the president's $87 billion Iraq request, calling it an example of "intellectual rot" and illustrating his argument with a clever analogy:

Kerry: I won't pay you to fix my car until you have a plan.

Mechanic: Um, I do have a plan: You pay me. I replace the engine I just took out. Your car works. That's the plan.

Kerry: How can you say you have a plan? Look at the terrible shape my car is in. It's worse than before; there isn't even an engine.

Mechanic: You're an idiot.

That's clever, and funny, because Jonah's a clever guy and a funny writer. Nevertheless, it has very little to do with what actually went on during the $87 billion debate. It's more like Bush and Kerry (and Edwards, Dean and Clark) are all mechanics with alternative plans for how to rebuild the car. Pulling out of analogy mode, Bush put forward a proposal for funding Iraq's reconstruction and the Democrats didn't think it was a very good plan. In the Senate, they proposed several amendments that, in their view, would have made the plan better, including proposals to finance the thing by canceling tax cuts for the very wealthy rather than borrowing money that folks my age will need to pay back years down the road.

Bush and his allies in Congress blocked all of these proposals. As a result of their disagreement with the president -- not over whether money should be spent rebuilding Iraq, but over how it should be spent -- some of the candidates who are also senators voted against the bill to register their displeasure with the administration. From outside the Senate, Dean and Clark voiced support for this course of action. Based on their public statements, it's perfectly clear that none of these men thinks we should "cut and run" from Iraq or that no money should be spent; they all just disagree with the way the president has gone about it.

Frankly, if they'd asked for my advice before the vote, I would have told them to vote "yes," since their actions were bound to wind up getting spun this way by hostile commentators. Still, they didn't have any good alternatives. If Kerry and Edwards had voted for the president's request but continued to voice disagreements with certain aspects of it, the press would have charged them with inconsistency. By voting against the request but continuing to voice agreement with certain aspects of it, they're now open to other charges of inconsistency. At the end of the day, however, reasonable people ought to be able to see that there are more options in life than "support the president" and "oppose the president," and that all of the candidates in question are somewhere in the middle ground, even if legislative votes obscure that fact.

--Matthew Yglesias

NO INSULT INTENDED. Interesting snippet from a Washington Post article:

Under questioning from Democrats yesterday, Claude Allen said he did not intend to insult homosexuals when as a campaign press aide to then-Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.) he referred to "queers."

What, exactly, did he mean to do then? Allen, incidentally, is currently the Deputy Secretary of Health and Human Services, and he's been nominated for a slot as an appeals court judge. Can't say that I know too much about him, but, based on this, he seems either to be intellectually deficient (he didn't know that referring to gays as "queers" was insulting) or else to be unable to admit past mistakes.

--Matthew Yglesias

DRUGSTORE COWBOYS. Imagine if during Prohibition, Calvin Coolidge had prevailed upon the prime minister of France to burn that country's vineyards. Today at TAP Online, Christopher Hayes says that's more or less analogous to what we asked of Bolivia's president in recent years by demanding that he cooperate in our coca eradication efforts. So it's not surprising that popular outrage forced him from office this week. But will U.S. officials learn anything from this debacle? Read Hayes' whole piece here.

--TAP Online

I KNOW METROSEXUALS. METROSEXUALS ARE FRIENDS OF MINE. AND GOVERNOR, YOU ARE NO METROSEXUAL. He may attract "Queer Eye for the Dean Guy" signs at rallies and boast that a gay man has called him "handsome," but Howard Dean is no "metrosexual," as he claimed to be at a breakfast meeting in Colorado yesterday. For the record, no man who "has been known to stuff pretzels into his pockets," goes anywhere with "shaving nicks on his neck, uneven fingernails and wrinkles from a hanger creasing his suit at the knees" (as has been documented in The Washington Post) and still wears a 20-year-old suit he bought for $125 at J.C. Penny's (as Dean claimed on The Tonight Show that he does) can call himself a metrosexual.

Warren St. John of The New York Times described the origins of the term in this June piece titled, "Metrosexuals Come Out":

[T]he term metrosexual, which is now being embraced by marketers, was coined in the mid-90's to mock everything marketers stand for. The gay writer Mark Simpson used the word to satirize what he saw as consumerism's toll on traditional masculinity. Men didn't go to shopping malls, buy glossy magazines or load up on grooming products, Mr. Simpson argued, so consumer culture promoted the idea of a sensitive guy -- who went to malls, bought magazines and spent freely to improve his personal appearance.

Everyone following Dean closely on the campaign trail knows two things. First, the man is an unrepentant cheapskate -- during the weekend before the last debate, while most other campaign staffers stayed in a Detroit skyscraper, Team Dean slept at a budget hotel. And second, he wears very old clothes.

"Everybody thinks I'm very hip, but I am really a square," Dean told the Denver Post today, backpedaling from his intitial claim.

And that, alas, is the verifiable truth.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

THANKS, GEORGE! Our friends at TomPaine.com are back on the op-ad warpath. Their latest delves into a little bit of legislative skullduggery to which the mainstream press has not yet caught on: an effort by the White House and Republican Rep. Bill Thomas to push through a series of massive corporate tax breaks worth $135 billion. Now you might think that, with the country already facing massive deficits and Congress looking at an $87 billion price tag for the first stage of Iraq reconstruction, the administration would be hesitant about such legislation -- especially since President Bush has already reduced taxes on corporations by 40 percent during his time in office. (Indeed, corporate taxes are now at their lowest level since 1983.)

Nope. What's especially amazing about this legislation is that, at a time when President Bush is asking thousands of American soldiers to risk their lives in Iraq, the administration and Republicans in Congress are pushing a bill that would give multinationals -- many of which already use offshore tax havens to avoid paying Uncle Sam -- yet more ways to shirk their fair share.

As TomPaine.com says, "Thank you, Mr. President." No wonder he's raising so much money from big business.

--TAP Online

DON'S DONNYBROOKS. Back in the summer of 2001, most people thought that Donald Rumsfeld would be the first member of Bush's cabinet to depart. Democrats didn't like him, of course, and neither did the career military folks at the Pentagon. More surprising -- and maybe more significant -- was that Republicans on Capitol Hill (whose ranks Rumsfeld once belonged to) were grumbling about his autocratic style. September 11 changed all that, briefly making him a hero. But now, two years later, Mary Lynn F. Jones says that GOP sentiment on the Hill towards Rumsfeld appears to be souring to pre-9-11 levels.

--TAP Online

CLASS ACTS. For a while now there's been a certain amount of buzz about the new "investor class," which, according to its enthusiasts, is a group of free-market zealots who will save the GOP from the demographic problem posed by the slow-but-steady decline in the proportion of white people in this country. The Washington Post recently took a look at the subject, but Ruy Teixeira says the Post got it wrong:

The Post also points out that only 37 percent of stock-holding Americans hold individual stocks directly–again consistent with other available data. But the Post fails to point out what other data show clearly: the growth of stock-holding among Americans is mostly driven by increased indirect stock-holding–basically mutual funds held in retirement vehicles like 401(k)s and IRAs. For example, Survey of Consumer Finances data show overall stock-holding among American households increasing from 32 percent to 48 percent between 1989 and 1998. But in that period, direct stock-holding went up just 6 points, from 13 percent to 19 percent, while indirect stock-holding increased 18 points, from 25 percent to 43 percent.

That's a particular problem in the context of the article because, as the article stresses, there is no convincing evidence that indirect stock-holding has any effect on one’s political views. In other words, by far the most popular form of stock ownership and the one that has mostly driven the rise in stock-holding among Americans currently has little political importance.

It's also worth recalling that as the Enron debacle taught us, the interests of the typical small investor are by no means always aligned with the interests of the sort of high-level corporate managers who tend to vote Republican. Kevin Drum has a post up discussing a chart taken from a recent Economist article demonstrating that CEO compensation per dollar of net profit has increased five-fold in the past 40 years or so. There's no possible justification for this in market terms, and while it's possible to look at it as a classic case of bosses screwing the workers, it's also a case of the bosses screwing the small investors who don't get to have a real say in the management of the companies they ostensibly own.

--Matthew Yglesias

DON'T BLAME ME, I'M THE PRESIDENT. It's almost axiomatic at this point that whenever President Bush gives a press conference or answers reporters' questions, we can expect some kind of blunder or gaffe. And the latest was no different. Pressed on whether his speech last May declaring an end to major combat in Iraq, delivered under a "Mission Accomplished" banner, was premature, Bush told reporters that, in essence, it was the Navy's fault for putting the sign up. Or as press secretary Scott McClellan parses, "We took care of the production of it. We have people to do those things. But the Navy actually put it up." So the White House made the sign, but the Navy put it up. Or something. Anyway, it's the Navy's fault.

How ludicrous is this? Very. Let's leave aside that, even if the White House had nothing to do with the banner whatsoever, abdicating responsibility for a piece of plastic that once flapped over the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln does absolutely nothing to absolve the administration of a very obvious series of easily foreseable errors and oversights regarding post-war planning for Iraq. The notion that Bush's landing on the Lincoln was anything but a very carefully stage-managed public-relations stunt is literally unbelievable. Let us keep in mind the attention to detail we witnessed last May. The carrier was re-routed so as not to make port before the president's scheduled visit. When that carrier got too close to land anyway, the White House made sure the ship's heading was such that the shoreline would not be visible in photographs and videos of the president's speech taken by the press. And that's not all. Not long after the Lincoln speech, Elisabeth Bumiller of The New York Times got the Bush team on record gloating about what a good job it had done:

The most elaborate -- and criticized -- White House event so far was Mr. Bush's speech aboard the Abraham Lincoln announcing the end of major combat in Iraq. White House officials say that a variety of people, including the president, came up with the idea, and that [White House communications staffer Scott] Sforza embedded himself on the carrier to make preparations days before Mr. Bush's landing in a flight suit and his early evening speech.

Media strategists noted afterward that Mr. Sforza and his aides had choreographed every aspect of the event, even down to the members of the Lincoln crew arrayed in coordinated shirt colors over Mr. Bush's right shoulder and the "Mission Accomplished" banner placed to perfectly capture the president and the celebratory two words in a single shot. The speech was specifically timed for what image makers call "magic hour light," which cast a golden glow on Mr. Bush.

All of this is perfectly fine -- the president has one of the best media teams in memory, many members of which were in fact recruited from television networks. This is the kind of thing they do. What's funny is that Bush and McClellan are trying to shuck responsibility for it now -- hey, it wasn't us, it was Ensign Johnson! Yeah, that's the ticket.

The rest of Bumiller's article is worth reading, as it illuminates various other examples of how carefully this White House manages such events:

Officials of past Democratic and Republican administrations marvel at how the White House does not seem to miss an opportunity to showcase Mr. Bush in dramatic and perfectly lighted settings. It is all by design: the White House has stocked its communications operation with people from network television who have expertise in lighting, camera angles and the importance of backdrops.

On Tuesday, at a speech promoting his economic plan in Indianapolis, White House aides went so far as to ask people in the crowd behind Mr. Bush to take off their ties, WISH-TV in Indianapolis reported, so they would look more like the ordinary folk the president said would benefit from his tax cut.

"They understand the visual as well as anybody ever has," said Michael K. Deaver, Ronald Reagan's chief image maker. "They watched what we did, they watched the mistakes of Bush I, they watched how Clinton kind of stumbled into it, and they've taken it to an art form."

The White House efforts have been ambitious -- and costly. For the prime-time television address that Mr. Bush delivered to the nation on the anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks, the White House rented three barges of giant Musco lights, the kind used to illuminate sports stadiums and rock concerts, sent them across New York Harbor, tethered them in the water around the base of the Statue of Liberty and then blasted them upward to illuminate all 305 feet of America's symbol of freedom. It was the ultimate patriotic backdrop for Mr. Bush, who spoke from Ellis Island.

For a speech that Mr. Bush delivered last summer at Mount Rushmore, the White House positioned the best platform for television crews off to one side, not head on as other White Houses have done, so that the cameras caught Mr. Bush in profile, his face perfectly aligned with the four presidents carved in stone.

And on Monday, for remarks the president made promoting his tax cut plan near Albuquerque, the White House unfurled a backdrop that proclaimed its message of the day, "Helping Small Business," over and over. The type was too small to be read by most in the audience, but just the right size for television viewers at home.

"I don't know who does it," Mr. Deaver said, "but somebody's got a good eye over there."

A good eye for image management, yes. It's too bad so many in the White House are blind to the consequences of their own actions and beliefs regarding Iraq.

--Nick Confessore

MAKING PROGRESS. If you haven't yet heard of the Center for American Progress, the Beltway's new progressive policy think-tank and co-sponsor of this week's "New American Strategies for Security and Peace" conference in Washington, check out this write-up in The New York Times Magazine. And make sure you subscribe to the Progress Report, the center's daily compendium of facts, figures and arguments, delivered to your e-mail box every morning. It's a more-than-handy weapon for the war of ideas.

--TAP Online

STRANGE SUCCESS. So how do you spin a series of suicide attacks that has killed several dozen and wounded hundreds? Just ask the president:

There are terrorists in Iraq who are willing to kill anybody in order to stop our progress. The more successful we are on the ground, the more these killers will react.

So . . . we'll know we're losing when the attacks stop? Seems pretty unpersuasive to me, and it looks like some prominent veterans aren't buying it either:

Sen. John F. Kerry (Mass.), a presidential candidate, likened Bush's statement to the "light at the end of the tunnel" claims during the Vietnam War. "Does the president really believe that suicide bombers are willing to strap explosives to their bodies because we're restoring electricity and creating jobs for Iraqis?" Kerry asked in a statement.

Bush got a similar reprimand earlier from Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who has supported the president on Iraq. "This is the first time that I have seen a parallel to Vietnam, in terms of information that the administration is putting out versus the actual situation on the ground," he told Newsweek.

Meanwhile, over at NRO, David Frum has an alternative up-is-down explanation of why the attacks in Iraq are a good thing:

The grisly events in Baghdad shock and horrify--but they also underscore the logic of the Iraq campaign. So long as the victims of terrorism were Westerners, it was not going to be easy to persuade the people of the Middle East of the moral wrongness of terror. You will sometimes hear moderate Palestinians condemn suicide bombing as "counter-productive," but almost never as "immoral." Alas, that's just how human beings are: We accept the sufferings of others with remarkable calm. Now, though, the Islamic extremists are turning their violence on the people of Baghdad and institutions that serve those people. It's as vivid a lesson as possible of what is at issue in the war on terror--and precisely the kind of lesson most likely to change minds in the Arab world.

It seems to me that if this is the logic of the Iraq campaign, then we've been going about things the wrong way. After all, rather than devising this complicated plan where we invade a country and then attract terrorist attacks, we could've just launched some terrorist attacks against Arabs ourselves -- and taught the lesson Frum refers to with the loss of fewer American lives. Back in the real world, though, insofar as we're not in Iraq to find weapons that don't exist, I thought we were there to make the lives of Iraqis better, not worse.

Now if Frum had pointed to this not as the "logic" of the invasion, but rather as a silver lining in an otherwise cloudy day, I'd be prepared to at least hope that he was right. Nevertheless, I'm seeing precious little in the way of empirical evidence that the Iraq campaign has done anything to change attitudes in the Arab world toward the United States for the better. It's easy enough to sit back and say that Arabs ought to think that we're on their side, but actually making it happen is another matter entirely.

--Matthew Yglesias

"IS THIS WHAT MAKES YOU PROUD TO BE AN AMERICAN?" That's the question David Brooks -- in a rare return to his "national greatness conservativism" days -- asks of the proposed, and fantastically shady, deal for the Air Force to lease tankers from Boeing. His column is as good one-stop-shopping on the issue as I've seen. As he shows, there's plenty of blame to go around, from Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) to the AFL-CIO. Read it and weep.

--Nick Confessore

BAD NEWS. The Christian Science Monitor's Dante Chinni makes a few good points in this column on the Bush administration's complaints about media coverage. The first is: Who are the Bushies kidding? This White House was treated by the press with kid gloves for nearly three years -- three years during which it basically treated the press corps like mewling two-year-olds. The second point -- one I think Chinni actually understates -- is that the press isn't reporting good news because there isn't much of it to go around, a fact for which the folks in the White House bear at least as much responsibility as anyone else, and probably more:

But now, as much as the president wants good news reported, there simply isn't a lot to be had at the moment. The nation's former surplus is now a record deficit, thanks in large part to tax cuts the president advocated. School principals and parents are unhappy with the education reform he pushed for and then underfunded. States aren't pleased that they're seeing more federal mandates, some of which involve homeland security, without seeing more money coming their way.

On top of all of this is Iraq, where the president maintains the press isn't reporting on the major progress being made. But at the same time, his secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, said in a candid memo that it's "pretty clear" the US and its allies can carry the day "but it will be a long, hard slog."

And as time goes by, it's becoming clearer that the US went into Iraq on faulty information that was either poorly gathered and assembled or put together to be deliberately misleading.

Not that the administration seems willing to admit that publicly.

--Nick Confessore

DEAN'S TAX WEAKNESS. I think Will Saletan gets it right when he points out that Howard Dean's stance on President Bush's tax cuts -- repeal all of them -- is going to hurt him in the general election. (Whether Dean's position is substantively correct is another question, unfortunately.) As Saletan points out:

Part of the problem is that the average middle-class person's share of the tax cuts, while low, isn't zero. As Kerry points out, for people with kids, it's substantial. Another part of the problem, noted by Kerry and Joe Lieberman, is that the middle-class portion of the tax cut was originally pushed by congressional Democrats. But the biggest problem is Dean's stated reason for repealing that middle-class portion: that he has to do so in order to balance the budget. If the amount of money involved is so small that you don't need it as a taxpayer, why is it so big that Dean needs it as president?

The truth is, even the congressional Democrats who forced Bush to add the middle-class reductions to his original tax cut package did a terrible job of taking credit for it; Bush later went around the country acting as though the whole thing had been his idea. But that's part of the problem for the Democrats. If the tax cuts are big enough to be worth taking credit for, in a sense they are worth repealing (if you're serious about deficit reduction, as Howard Dean wants to be). And if they are so small that repealing them won't do much for balanced budgets -- as in the case of the middle-class reductions -- they're also harder to take credit for.

--Nick Confessore

CONFERENCE CALL. "New American Strategies for Security and Peace," a foreign-policy conference that has been put together by the Prospect, the Century Foundation and the Center for American Progress, will begin today at noon with an address by Wesley Clark. Registration for the conference is full, but the entirety of the event will be shown in a live Webcast (here). The conference will run through 9:00 p.m. tonight and will conclude tomorrow morning, with sessions from 7:30 to noon.

--TAP Online

RECONSTRUCTIVE SURGERY. How can we get Iraq off the operating table without breaking our bank? At TAP Online, Merrill Goozner makes the case for why we should give half of the amount proposed by the Bush administration in aid to Iraq -- and why we should give it as a grant rather than as a loan.

--TAP Online

NUTTIN', HONEY. Ever wonder what juicy details await you in David Kay's final report? After all, the interim report released earlier this month contained -- notwithstanding a lot of bluster from the White House -- nothing that corroborated the administration's pre-war claims about Iraq. This Washington Post article says that new evidence is unlikely to materialize:

According to records made available to The Washington Post and interviews with arms investigators from the United States, Britain and Australia, it did not require a comprehensive survey to find the central assertions of the Bush administration's prewar nuclear case to be insubstantial or untrue. Although Hussein did not relinquish his nuclear ambitions or technical records, investigators said, it is now clear he had no active program to build a weapon, produce its key materials or obtain the technology he needed for either.

Among the closely held internal judgments of the Iraq Survey Group, overseen by David Kay as special representative of CIA Director George J. Tenet, are that Iraq's nuclear weapons scientists did no significant arms-related work after 1991, that facilities with suspicious new construction proved benign, and that equipment of potential use to a nuclear program remained under seal or in civilian industrial use.

Most notably, investigators have judged the aluminum tubes to be "innocuous," according to Australian Brig. Gen. Stephen D. Meekin, who commands the Joint Captured Enemy Materiel Exploitation Center, the largest of a half-dozen units that report to Kay. That finding is pivotal, because the Bush administration built its case on the proposition that Iraq aimed to use those tubes as centrifuge rotors to enrich uranium for the core of a nuclear warhead.

Administration officials interviewed for this report defended the integrity of the government's prewar intelligence and public statements. None agreed to be interviewed on the record. Vice President Cheney, in a televised interview last month, referred to a National Intelligence Estimate of October 2002, which said among other things that there was "compelling evidence that Saddam is reconstituting a uranium enrichment effort." Cheney said investigators searching for confirmation of those judgments "will find in fact that they are valid." His office did not respond to questions on Friday.

Dick Cheney has been the most indefatigable defender of the most maximalist administration positions on Iraq. Which means he also has the most to lose if the facts do not line up with his preferred version of reality.

--Nick Confessore

TIMES WARP. How did The Washington Times distort the Prospect's exclusive interview with Bill Clinton? Our executive editor, Michael Tomasky, explains here.

--TAP Online

WISH LIST. What is North Korea really after? At TAP Online, John Feffer says Kim Jong-Il wants two things: time and money. And, Feffer argues, delivering those things doesn't mean that we're giving in to nuclear blackmail -- it just means that we're setting North Korea on the path to Chinese-style reform.

--TAP Online

TOLERANCE IN LOUISIANA. Like me, Mark Kleiman seems to be a bit annoyed at GOP trumpeting of Bobby Jindal's gubernatorial bid in Louisiana as proof of the brave new era of racial tolerance in the Republican Party and the South. In particular, he's wondering about this Los Angeles Times report:

The office, a cottage with peach-painted walls, lies miles from the home Jindal shares with his wife and 1-year-old daughter and blocks from the Capitol. Volunteers were busy calling supporters. Beside them was a list of talking points: "Bobby was born in Louisiana." "Bobby is a Christian." "Bobby will support tax cuts."

So Indian-Americans are welcome in the Republican big tent as long as they're native-born citizens who are Christian. How open-minded. Let me also note that the race problem in the American South -- and the post-1964 GOP -- has to do with blacks, not Indians or whatever other non-white folks conservatives may manage to build bridges with. Take a look at the 2000 exit polls and you'll see that Republicans have made essentially no progress over the past 40 years in attracting black support.

--Matthew Yglesias

MARKET PRETZELS. After talking a bit about the doughnut structure of the Medicare prescription-drug benefit being debated in Congress, William Safire gets himself tied up in knots trying to explain why Americans shouldn't be permitted to buy prescription drugs from Canada (where those drugs are cheaper). You don't normally see people singing the virtues of free markets in an effort to explain why the government ought to restrict trade, but something about the heavily regulated nature of the pharmaceutical industry abroad seems to drive some commentators a bit loopy.

These folks need to have a bit more faith in their precious markets -- if letting Americans buy drugs at the price negotiated by the Canadian government really does turn the whole industry unprofitable, then the industry will just negotiate a new deal with Canada and the other countries that have price controls on these drugs. There's no reason to think doomsday scenarios of massive drug shortages will come true unless you believe that current price control regimes are, for some reason, permanent and irrevocable. Renegotiating would be inconvenient for the pharmaceutical industry, which is perfectly content to let the American consumer single-handedly subsidize global R&D costs while the rest of the world free rides, but there's no reason for the American government to consciously perpetuate this state of affairs.

In the long run, reimportation will cause U.S. and non-U.S. prices to converge somewhere lower than what Americans are currently paying. But don't take my word for it: Edward Crane, president of the CATO Institute, and Riger Pilon, his vice president for legal affairs, hardly enemies of the free market, said the same thing over the summer. I disagree with Crane and Pilon about what an ideal system would look like, but there's no doubt that the current system is quite un-ideal from the point of view of the American consumer. Re-importation would move us toward something better.

--Matthew Yglesias

WEEKEND UPDATE. Too confused by the time switch to follow the news? Here's what you missed:

The Columnists

• Nicholas Kristof. Shocking discovery: discrimination against gays is irrational.
• David Brooks. Shocker No. 2: Britney Spears is vacuous.
• Colbert King. Shocker No. 3: I'm still comparing Baghdad to D.C. for no reason!
• E.J. Dionne. If Bush wants more positive media coverage of the situation in Iraq he should actually improve the situation in Iraq.
• Thomas Friedman. If you thought having NATO occupy the West Bank was a bad idea, you're really going to hate this one.
• David Ignatius. Paul Wolfowitz is a visionary genius -- but if his plan doesn't work we're screwed.
• George Will. The modern world is different because people care about aesthetics and not just utility (better not tell him about all those medieval cathedrals).
• David Broder. Howard Dean's 38 percent polling in New Hampshire can't be explained by his anti-war views since only 35 percent of New Hampshire voters agree with those views (better not tell him about the margin of error).
• Jim Hoagland. In a desperate ploy to avoid being mocked by Tapped, I've written a column about the Israeli security fence that's totally correct.

Op-Ed You Actually Need to Read

• William Saletan argues that abortion rights supporters need to spend more time talking up the rights of women and less talking down the interests of fetuses.

The Shows

• Fox News Sunday. Brit Hume and Tony Snow talked judicial nominations, while Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist was on hand to provide some ideological balance.
• Face the Nation. Our man in Baghdad, L. Paul Bremer, explained that holding actual elections for the Iraqi constitutional convention would create an unnecessary delay on the road to democracy. Thomas Friedman called for a re-invasion of the Sunni Triangle.
• Meet the Press. Colin Powell on talks with North Korea: "I try not to hyperbolize." Later, Chuck Hagel sounded, if not Deanian, then certainly Kerry-esque, regarding the administration's pre-war WMD hyperbole, warning "this is not about party loyalty."
• This Week. Bremer was back, telling us that things are getting better in Iraq except for the more sophisticated attacks, more hostile public opinion and more porous borders; even George Will wasn't buying it.

--Matthew Yglesias

PARTISAN PORK. As if House Republicans weren't already bungling the appropriations process badly enough, the chairman of the Labor, Health and Human Services and Education subcommittee, Rep. Ralph Regula (R-Ohio), has decided to add more animosity to the mix.

As The Hill reported Wednesday, $1 billion of the subcommittee's appropriations bill has been earmarked for special projects in lawmakers' districts -- a substantial amount of pork for this particular legislation (and these lean times). While this $1 billion would ordinarily go to districts on both sides of the aisle, Regula has decided that earmarks will only go to his 229 fellow Republicans. To punish Democrats for unanimously declining to support the bill, Regula has proposed, with the backing of the House Republican leadership, that no Democratic districts receive earmarks.

Regula told The Hill, "I pointed out to leadership that not one Democrat voted for this bill, in subcommittee, in committee and on the House floor. . . . So I gather they didn't like it much and wouldn't want any part of it." What did the leadership think of this idea? Take a guess.

Rightly infuriated by this step, Rep. Dave Obey (D-Wisc.), the ranking Democrat on the appropriations committee, penned a terrific three-page letter to Regula today. He wrote, in part:

The appropriation bill that you took to the floor in July provided $8 billion less in funding for the No Child Left Behind Act than the amounts authorized for that program only two years ago, and $11.2 billion less than the amount needed to cover 40% of the cost of educating all disabled students, a goal widely espoused by Members of Congress on both sides of the aisle. Incredibly, the bill was $1.2 billion below the amount promised for disabled education in the Budget Resolution pushed through the House by your leadership only three weeks before this bill was reported from subcommittee. The appropriation bill that you took to the floor also forced an actual reduction in research to conquer a number of dreaded diseases and it provides fewer funds for the "Meals on Wheels" program than are needed to maintain the current number of meals being served.

. . .

I think you know our reasons [for opposing the appropriations bill] and I think you know that they were heartfelt matters of conscience that gave us no alternative but to vote against the funding levels that you were forced to put forward.

. . .

What this proposal really translates into is not simply the diversion of money needed to more adequately fund critical national priorities such as reading improvement, but the use of those funds for the creation of a slush fund to intimidate members into voting against adequate funds for programs that they believe are important for the American people. The clear message is that if you support the Republican cuts in education, health research and assistance to seniors, you will get projects to help with your reelection. If you vote your conscience and support more funding for education and health you will get stiffed. This is nothing more than systematic bribery with public funds to enforce the "Robin Hood in reverse" policies of your party.

The 205 Congressional Districts represented by House Democrats contain more than 130 American taxpayers. To tell those people that they will receive no portion of a $1 billion pot of the nation's tax dollars because they are represented by a Member of Congress who supports more money for their schools is not only in my judgment unethical but represents a fundamental corruption of the legislative process.

Obey closes the letter by proposing that the $1 billion not be used for earmarks at all:

If the money that is planned for all earmarks is instead used to increase support for No Child Left Behind and Individuals with Disabilities Education programs and is used to ensure no cutbacks in health research and feeding programs for seniors, I would be willing to support the bill and urge my colleagues on the Democratic side of the aisle to do the same.

If Regula is really intent on punishing dissenters, then condolences to the nine Republicans who joined Democrats in voting against the bill.

--Heidi Pauken

DOWN THE MEMORY HOLE? I hate to speculate here, but it is awfully strange that National Review has pulled down its editorial calling for the dismissal of Lt. Gen. William Boykin. Here's the explanation:

CORRECTION ON BOYKIN [NR Editors]
National Review, in the issue out today, runs an editorial paragraph that it did not mean to run. We had a debate among the editors--as we debate many things--about Gen. William Boykin, who recently made some highly provocative remarks about the war on terror. Some editors felt that he should be fired forthwith; others demurred. A draft editorial paragraph was prepared, stating the position that Boykin should be fired; at just about the last minute, we decided to withhold judgment--to see how the investigation into the general's behavior proceeded, and to reach a conclusion then.

Because of a production error, that paragraph--the one calling for Boykin's head--went to the printer. And thus appears in the magazine. We removed it from our html edition, but about the "hard copy edition," we could do nothing.

We will weigh in again--finally and definitively--on General Boykin, when we, along with everyone else, know all that we should know.

Here's why I find it fishy. First, as of this writing, the editorial is still up -- it's just not linked from the front page.

Second, from what I've seen -- and I'm sure the folks at NR will correct me if I'm wrong -- the magazine doesn't generally post content from the print magazine online. The one thing I've noticed NR does go out of its way to publish are the editorials, especially when they are timely. (The Boykin editorial, which was originally slated to appear in the Nov. 10, 2003 issue, had, by all appearances, rushed online as an advance preview, so that it would get some play while the Boykin debate was still hot.) So it's unusual that this went up on the site accidentally. And that whole last sentence (about how they will only opine on Boykin once "we, along with everyone else, know all that we should know") is weird. Not only does it mimic the evolving Pentagon line on the internal investigation (which is basically a fig leaf), but it retroactively states that the magazine should not have had an opinion in the first place. It's like an intellectual airbrushing.

Obviously, I think NR got this one right the first time, and I admired them for ignoring the White House's spin in favor of adherence to a sound principle. For all I know, this was simply the result of a "production error," as the note says. But I'd hate to think that a complaint from within (or, worse, without) the magazine got the editorial pulled.

--Nick Confessore

TRAIL MIX: JOHN EDWARDS, 2.0. Of the many things likely to be on display during the Democratic National Committee's presidential primary debate in Detroit this Sunday -- amid the attacks on Howard Dean and Wesley Clark by, in all likelihood, Dick Gephardt, Joe Lieberman and John Kerry -- will be John Edwards, Version 2.0. This Edwards isn't just a charming southerner; he's an angry, fist-throwing fighter. He's serious, he's tough -- and he's somehow more believable than Edwards 1.0.

Edwards 2.0 has been developing for weeks. There's that new, angry-looking "I will fight my heart out for you" picture on his Web site, for one. And a couple of weeks ago he sponsored a Dean-like petition drive. (Wasn't it just a few months ago that only activist groups -- and not elected officials -- were sponsoring petition drives?) He totally redesigned his blog -- getting rid of the old, cumbersome AOL-style graphics and adding open discussion threads. And he made darn sure everyone knew he wasn't giving Bush a blank check on Iraq.

"I will support our troops in Iraq by not giving President Bush a blank check for Iraqi reconstruction funds," he told supporters last week in an e-mail. Then, as promised, Edwards -- who voted last October to support the president's resolution authorizing the war in Iraq -- voted against the $87 billion request for funding U.S. troops and rebuilding Iraq.

The Washington Post's Mark Leibovich kicked off the week by describing Edwards' anger up close:

One of the striking things about seeing Edwards up close is the degree of raw anger he evinces in his speeches -- and the level of anger he elicits from his audiences toward the president. It's not uncommon for presidential candidates such as Howard Dean, Dick Gephardt or John Kerry to attack Bush's performance with contempt and ridicule.

But Edwards's anger seems more stomach-level. He is prone to attack Bush not just for what he has done in office, but for who he is and where he comes from. Several times a day, Edwards will dismiss the president as "a man who only values wealth and money."

A lot of this angry rhetoric will sound familiar to those who've been following the campaign. Howard Dean has been using some of the very same language as Edwards for months to take on senators (such as Edwards himself) who voted to authorize the use of force in Iraq. "Now they're trying to say, 'We tried to constrain the president,'" Dean told The Associated Press last January. "Nonsense. They all voted to give the president a blank check."

That phrase wasn't even particularly original when Dean started using it. On Oct. 5 of last year, The Wall Street Journal's Al Hunt, appearing on CNN, declared the Senate's vote "a huge victory for George Bush. It gives him a virtual blank check when it comes to Iraq." And Sen. Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.) condemned the authorization of force as a "blank check" last October, and then voted against it.

So Edwards is going over ground that other Dems have covered. And, in fact, the North Carolina senator has been giving virtually the same stump speech that Liebovich recorded since at least last May. But the raw anger coming out of the Edwards camp these days -- the shift in tone from pleasant good humor to spittle-splattering rage -- is a relatively new thing.

It all seems to have started back in September, the week Clark got into the race and Hurricane Isabel hit North Carolina. Something shifted that week. An aide to a competing campaign told me he thinks it was that suddenly the middle-tier candidates all realized they were no longer fighting Dean for the nomination, but fighting each other for the chance to face off with Dean later in the contest.

Whatever it was, you could see it on Edwards' face when he appeared on Face the Nation on Sept. 21. You could see it in the DNC debates in New York City and Phoenix. Edwards looked worried. Something was bothering him, and it showed. And something strange started to happen as the worry furrowed his brow and the unhappiness -- or whatever it was -- soured the expression on his youthful, open face. Edwards started to look serious. His expression did something that had previsouly seemed impossible: It made him look older. Old enough that he began, for the first time, to look presidential. Aides to two of his competitors told me they'd noticed it, too. And, deep in the comment threads of the same online communities that fueled Dean's rise and drafted Clark, a slow groundswell of support for Edwards -- as VP, as second-choice and even as the nominee himself -- began to rise.

What this will mean for Edwards' campaign -- if anything -- is anybody's guess, especially given Edwards' Bob Graham-like fundraising in the last quarter. But with Clark and Lieberman out of Iowa, it could mean that there's a silver lining in Edwards' cloudy mood.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

SYMPATHY FOR THE CHIANGS. Like David Frum, I was more surprised to learn that Madame Chiang Kai-shek was alive two days ago than that she died yesterday. I do not, however, share his admiration for the Kuomintang regime:

The Times' lengthy obituary of this titanic stresses the negative: her authoritarianism and corruption. All true and all fair. But there is something else to be said, and it went unsaid: Without being democrats themselves, the Chinese Nationalists saved a remnant of China for democracy. Taiwan has had two free elections since 1996; a third is scheduled for this coming summer. The Nationalists sometimes resisted democracy – but they made it possible, and in time they yielded to it without bloodshed. The same cannot be said of the communists against whom Mme. Chiang tried to warn the United States and the world sixty years ago.

Unlike President Bush, I'm no apologist for the Chinese communists, but this is a very odd way of looking at the world. Among other things, if members of the KMT leadership had been more interested in providing effective government and fighting the communists than in lining their own pockets, maybe Mao wouldn't have taken over China in the first place. The fact that they eventually yielded to democracy is, moreover, much more a reflection of the weakness of their position (on a small island that needed the West to protect it) than of the high ideals of the regime.

Take this as a useful reminder of the fact that the concept of supporting freedom and democracy is sufficiently flexible to encompass some pretty odd things. For a contemporary example, take a gander at the current U.S. relationship with Uzbekistan.

--Matthew Yglesias

TRAIL MIX: IS A NEW BELTWAY CONVENTIONAL WISDOM ON DEAN EMERGING? In the past week, I've been surprised to discover a consensus emerging among the journalists and political consultants with whom I speak regularly -- namely, that Howard Dean is very likely to win the Democratic nomination. I say surprised because two weekends ago I was up in Burlington, where Dean's team isn't yet acting like it's convinced of any such thing. While the journalists and consultants (and none of these folks are Deaniacs) said they were giving Dean anywhere from 70 to 85 percent odds of winning the nomination, the candidate's team in Burlington (made up of the Deaniest of Deaniacs) was busy trying to figure out how to respond to the growing chorus of attacks from Dick Gephardt on the Medicare issue; how to create a Democratic version of the GOP Team Leader organizing tools; and how to prepare its followers -- many of whom are political newbies -- for the increasingly nasty attacks they're anticipating as the campaign enters its next phase. In a field this big, overconfidence is an error no campaign -- even a top-tier one -- can afford.

Perhaps this discrepancy exists because Burlington is isolated from any and all conventional wisdoms and from the chattering classes, in general. Last summer, these folks ignored the negative talk about Dean after his painful Meet the Press performance, and this fall, despite loads of cash on hand, enthusiastic volunteers and positive polling data, they are not taking anything for granted.

Meanwhile, the D.C. conventional wisdom around Dean appears to be solidifying. National Journal magazine (sorry, subscribers only) polled 50 Democratic Party insiders and found that Dean is the odds-on favorite to win the nomination; he received 36 votes, topping Gephardt, John Kerry and Wesley Clark.

And in New Hampshire, pollsters at Zogby International found Dean hitting a new high of 40-percent support, while his closest rival, Kerry, was at 17 percent and all other candidates languished in the single digits. "This qualifies as juggernaut status," pollster John Zogby said in a news release.

So what about Clark, the name on everyone's lips just three weeks ago, now tied in the Zogby poll with Edwards for 6 percent in New Hampshire? The conventional wisdom on Clark's campaign seems to have taken a nosedive. "It's like watching Michael Jordan try to play baseball," said one political consultant familiar with the inner workings of the campaign. Journalists who've followed Clark closely and had high hopes for him just a few weeks ago are now describing the Clark campaign as reminiscent of the way a bicycle keeps going even after its rider has fallen off.

But can you trust this kind of D.C. wisdom? Michelle Goldberg had an interesting piece in Salon yesterday on Clark's ground troops (and the Clark team is as bad as World War I-era newspapers when it comes to popularizing the use of military metaphors). The piece suggests that it's way too early for anyone to be counting the general out. Clark's followers love him. That will count for something.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

SHOULD THE DEMS HAVE FILIBUSTERED? The other day on the new Center for American Progress Web site, Matthew Miller took the Senate Democrats to task, saying that instead of trying and failing to amend the $87 billion Iraq request to include the cancelation of tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans and then voting against the unamended bill, the party should have filibustered the request unless the GOP agreed to the Democratic amendment:

Why didn't Democratic leaders seize this opportunity and make a real stand? I can see only three explanations, each as depressing as the next:

1 - They didn't care enough substantively to pursue it.

2 - They cared substantively but didn't think they could prevail in such a showdown, given how they think the debate would have played out in the media against a White House with a bigger megaphone.

3 -They cared, but the party is too incoherent on Iraq and its aftermath to agree on a simple message like the one laid out above.

Reason number 2 sounds like a pretty good explanation (though there was probably a little 3 in there as well) and it seems to me that anyone who thought the Democrats couldn't prevail under the circumstances would probably be right. After all, check out Eric Alterman's account (also on the American Progress Web site) of the press coverage the party earned for taking the much milder step of just voting no, and remember what happened under similar circumstances when the country was debating the Homeland Security bill. The fact is that an opposition party has very little ability to steer the course of events, especially when national security is the topic.

Simply blocking something from happening is certainly possible, but forcing the country to take positive action by changing the tax code really isn't something 40-odd senators can do. Moreover, I'm not sure that the Democrats' failure to achieve this is really all that big of a deal. Whoever gets the nomination in 2004 is going to wind up proposing a much bigger rollback of the tax cut than was on the table during the $87 billion debate, and it's the outcome of that debate that will have important implications for the nation's solvency.

--Matthew Yglesias

THE REALLY REAL SCANDAL. A few weeks ago when Valerie Plame was all the rage, conservatives were telling us that the real scandal wasn't the leak, it was the fact that the dirty peaceniks at the CIA were undermining the president's efforts to make the case for invading Iraq. Now, though, the administration's allies in Congress want us to believe that the real question is why the CIA oversold the threat from Iraq. At the same time, however, the GOP is trying to prevent an investigation into the more significant issue of how and why administration officials managed to browbeat the intelligence community into saying what they wanted to hear.

Keep in mind that the administration tried the "blame the CIA" tactic once before, after Joseph Wilson's story -- about the uranium that wasn't there -- first broke. Ultimately, it didn't work because George Tenet is a pretty savvy bureaucratic operator. Which isn't to say that Tenet is without sin either. According to Seymour Hersh, Tenet's savvy was part of the problem:

The C.I.A. assessment reflected both deep divisions within the agency and the position of its director, George Tenet, which was far from secure. (The agency had been sharply criticized, after all, for failing to provide any effective warning of the September 11th attacks.) In the view of many C.I.A. analysts and operatives, the director was too eager to endear himself to the Administration hawks and improve his standing with the President and the Vice-President. Senior C.I.A. analysts dealing with Iraq were constantly being urged by the Vice-President’s office to provide worst-case assessments on Iraqi weapons issues. "They got pounded on, day after day," one senior Bush Administration official told me, and received no consistent backup from Tenet and his senior staff. "Pretty soon you say 'Fuck it.'" And they began to provide the intelligence that was wanted.

So there looks to be plenty of blame to go around here, but the misdeeds of the guys at the top are the more important ones, and any serious inquiry needs to look at the conduct of Dick Cheney, Don Rumsfeld and others, not just the work of CIA analysts.

--Matthew Yglesias

A TENUOUS MIDDLE GROUND. The White House appears to be trying to have it both ways on Lt. Gen. William Boykin. During a flight to Australia, President Bush said he had spoken to Muslim leaders in Indonesia, and remarked, "I said he didn't reflect my opinion. . . . Look, it just doesn't reflect what the government thinks. And I think they were pleased to hear that." But the Pentagon is ignoring calls from the Hill that Boykin be reassigned. And, according to this Associated Press story, the Pentagon put out a statement -- which I can't seem to find on its Web site -- repeating (and therefore, it would seem, endorsing) Boykin's statement that the United States is a "Christian nation."

Did all you skeptical Muslims in the Middle East -- you know, you folks who suspect the United States isn't interested in fighting terrorism but in wiping out Islam -- get that? Good.

If a senior official in the U.S. government is making repeated public statements that contradict official U.S. policy, then something is quite wrong. It's hard to imagine that Boykin would be treated so lightly by the administration if he had, say, spoken out against the Iraq War.

UPDATE: I see the good folks at National Review feel that Boykin should go, on the same principle. I'd say something about cats and dogs living together, but it's not necessary. There's a right answer here.

--Nick Confessore

THE FUTURE OF THE WAR ON TERRORISM. I've read Don Rumsfeld's memo, which is interesting and useful in a general sense -- one rarely gets to see senior officials thinking something through without the klieg lights on, so to speak. Phil Carter has some good thoughts here on the difficulty of knowing whether the "metrics" you have for success are really related to your stated goals. One of the remarkable things about officials in this administration, as some folks have observed, is their ability to willfully ignore information and data that contradict ideas they want desperately to be true -- and may even have convinced themselves are true. The fantasy that upper-income tax cuts will create jobs, that global warming isn't a problem, that Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction -- the list goes on. The inherent difficulty of measuring success in our fight against terrorism only plays to this tendency, allowing officials to define efficacious action in whatever way justifies the policies they already wanted to pursue. (If you doubt that President Bush has this problem, take a look at this Washington Times article, which explains that Bush signed off on the war plan for Iraq in August 2002 -- eight months before the invasion, recent statements to the contrary.)

--Nick Confessore

OVERREPORTING THE BAD NEWS? That's the rap against media coverage of Iraq these days, at least from some quarters. I think this argument has been largely overstated. There is definitely an emphasis on bad news coming out of Iraq, but that's not a consequence of conscious media bias. It's a systemic defect of the news media in general. Bad news -- conflict, failure, disaster -- drives news coverage. You don't read about all the planes that land safely, as the joke goes; you don't read about all the people who don't get murdered in D.C. And as far as Iraq goes, there's actually some indication that relevant negative news is being ignored. In this article, Editor and Publisher's Seth Porges says newspapers are actually understating casualties in Iraq:

When newspapers reported this week on poor medical and living conditions for Americans injured in Iraq, it might have come as a shock for some readers. For months, the press has barely mentioned non-fatal casualties or the severity of their wounds.

E&P reported in July that while deaths in combat are often tallied by newspapers, the many non-combat troop deaths in Iraq are virtually ignored. It turns out that newspaper readers have also been shortchanged in getting a sense of the number of troops injured, in and out of battle.

"There could be some inattention to [the number of injured troops]," said Philip Bennett, Washington Post assistant managing editor of the foreign desk. "And obviously if there is, it should be corrected. Soldiers getting wounded is part of the reality of conflict on the ground. I think if you were to find or discover that those figures are being overlooked, that would be something we'd want to correct."

Few newspapers routinely report injuries in Iraq, beyond references to specific incidents. Since the war began in March, 1,927 soldiers have been wounded in Iraq, many quite severely. (The tally is current as of Oct. 20.) Of this number, 1,590 were wounded in hostile action, and 337 from other causes. About 20% of the injured in Iraq have suffered severe brain injuries, and as many as 70% "had the potential for resulting in brain injury," according to an Oct. 16 article in The Boston Globe.

In fact, not only is the press underreporting some relevant bad news, it may be overreporting some of the good news. Remember all those sunny stories about how the occupation authorities had finally gotten many Iraqi schools and hospitals up and running? As Newsweek reported this week:

Paul (Jerry) Bremer, the U.S. civilian administrator in Iraq, proudly announced the reopening of Iraq's schools this month, while White House officials point to the opening of Iraq's 240 hospitals. In fact, many schools were already open in May, once major combat ended, and no major hospital closed during the war. But that didn't stop a group of Republican senators from tearing into American reporters covering Iraq earlier this month. "I was not told by the media... that thousands and thousands of Iraqi schoolchildren went back to school," said Larry Craig of Idaho, who recently toured Iraq. The senator neglected to mention that he slept both nights of his trip in Kuwait, not Iraq.

Newsweek also pointed out that those recent congressional junkets to the Middle East were part of a broader Bush administration strategy to sidestep the press and change the tenor of news coverage out of Iraq. So it sounds to me like, if anything, journalists need to be more vigilant there, not less.

-- Nick Confessore

KRUGMAN AND MAHATHIR. Ordinarily, I'm a Paul Krugman fan, but I think he got off track as he tried to hold Ariel Sharon and George W. Bush responsible for the rise of anti-Semitism in the world. That said, his point that Mahathir Mohamad is a pretty canny politician who wouldn't have said what he said unless there was a domestic audience for those kinds of sentiments still holds and is worth thinking about a bit. Reading Mahathir's remarks and denouncing them feels good and is probably necessary and worthwhile as well, but moral clarity will only get us so far. At the end of the day, we actually need a strategy to change minds in the Islamic world and, frankly, we don't have one. Take a look at Donald Rumsfeld's recent memo to top Pentagon officials and you'll see that he seems to be asking some of the right questions on this score, but doesn't really have any answers. Firing Jerry Boykin would at least prevent us from heading in the wrong direction, but it isn't a solution.

--Matthew Yglesias

PASS PROTECTION. Towards the end of September, Rick Santorum made an appearance at The Heritage Foundation to discuss marriage promotion. Prospect intern Thomas Lang was at the event and asked Santorum to reconcile his views on marriage promotion with his views on marriage protection (i.e. his position that marriage should only be an option for heterosexuals). Santorum's response to the question may surprise you.

--TAP Online

THE JOBS CLIMBDOWN. Yesterday's New York Times reported that most economists think Treasury Secretary John Snow's recent promise of 200,000 jobs per month for the next year is overly optimistic. Max Sawicky reminds us that this sunny picture is actually considerably more gloomy than the 344,000 jobs per month we were assured would be created by the latest round of tax cuts. As always, the Economic Policy Institute's Job Watch is on the case, and you can see last month's shortfall right here.

--Matthew Yglesias

CHANGE OF MENU. Jeffrey's at the Watergate, a restaurant that served Texas cooking, has closed its doors, reports The Washington Post. The restaurant, which claimed to be a "'hot spot' of the First Couple," served such meals as "Secretary Evans Roquefort and tomato salad" and "Condoleezza Rice lemon meringue tart with raspberry sauce."

The restaurant has returned to its old name, Aquarelle, which was a popular spot during the Clinton administration; it now serves Mediterranean cuisine. The Post writes that this is "not a symbol or a sign or a portent." Ever the optimists, we beg to differ.

--Erin Pressley

PAST IMPERFECT. Yesterday National Review Editor Rich Lowry accused the Prospect of an inability to "honestly grapple with much of anything," particularly Bill Clinton's record on terrorism. He was responding to an earlier critique by Matthew Yglesias of his recent effort to blame Clinton for 9-11. Today at TAP Online, Yglesias says Lowry's still got the story wrong -- both about Clinton and about National Review's record on terrorism policy during the 1990s.

--TAP Online

ASHCROFT'S BRIEFINGS. The White House has repeatedly assured the public that no special counsel is needed to oversee the investigation into the Valerie Plame leak on the grounds that the career prosecutors at the Justice Department are conducting the investigation without political interference. Perhaps, but then why does John Ashcroft need regular briefings about the status of the investigation? Even if Ashcroft doesn't take what he learns at these briefings and then use it to meddle, the mere fact that investigators know political appointees will be looking over their shoulders at all times can't help but influence their conduct.

Maybe Ashcroft feels that as long as the investigation is being conducted under the auspices of his department he has a duty to oversee what's taking place. That makes a certain amount of sense, but it's also all the more reason to take the matter out of his jurisdiction and place it in the hands of someone who can operate with real independence from the administration.

--Matthew Yglesias

SHOULD GEN. BOYKIN BE FIRED? Newsweek's Fareed Zakaria has a good column on William Boykin's ignorant and impolitic remarks about the Muslim religion. Naturally, many conservatives want to paint this as yet another example of liberals trying to strip God from the public square and discriminate against conservative Christians. But the real question here is over the propriety of a senior, appointed government official making repeated public comments that many of our foreign allies will find offensive and bigoted, and which may well work to the detriment of our military and diplomatic interests. Zakaria argues:

[T]he issue is not whether the general is free to express his views, but whether Secretary Rumsfeld wants someone who holds such views in high office. After all, were the general to have expressed his opinion that the Iraq war was a blunder, he would have been fired. Were he to have made an anti-Semitic comment (like the noxious ones Malaysia's Prime Minister Mahathir made last week), he would have been fired. Why? Because those freely expressed views would contradict the Bush administration's basic philosophy. So are we to assume that Boykin's views do not contradict administration policy? No one is urging that Secretary Rumsfeld muzzle Boykin, merely that he allow him to enter the private sector, where he may express his views even more freely. He could even sit in for Rush Limbaugh.

This is not simply a matter of symbolism, though that is important because this story is now being broadcast across the globe. The position Boykin holds -- deputy undersecretary for intelligence -- is one in which he would have to interact routinely with Pakistanis, Egyptians, Afghans, Indonesians; Muslims from all over the world. Will he be effective in establishing close working relationships with these officials, who have all watched him slur their religion? Is this a man who will be able to objectively sift through intelligence and analysis about the state of Muslim societies, the difference between moderates and extremists, the distinctions among various fundamentalist groups? Or does he look at them all and see ... Satan?

Perhaps the most troubling aspect of Boykin's remark was its utter ignorance. Compare Boykin's crude machismo about "my God" being bigger than "his God" to Sen. Joseph Lieberman’s eloquent -- and historically accurate -- remarks last Friday to an Arab-American group. "We meet here today not as Muslims or Christians or Jews," Lieberman said, "not as people of Arab or European descent or African or Asian descent ... We are children of the same God and of the same father, Abraham. We are quite literally brothers and sisters." That is the message America should send to the world. And it will cost us nothing.

I don't think Boykin is unfit for service as undersecretary of defense for intelligence because he is a conservative Christian. But he is arguably unfit for his current post because he didn't seem to understand that his public comments were inappropriate for a public official in his position.

I spent a few minutes trying to think of what would be the left-wing equivalent of Boykin in a Democratic administration. The only thing I could conjure up would be a situation in which, somehow, somebody with hardline pro-Palestinian beliefs was appointed to a senior Pentagon post, and went around the United States giving speeches at mosques arguing that Zionism is racism. It's hard to imagine someone with such views being given an appointment in the first place; it's even harder to imagine that he would be allowed to make public speeches that contradicted the stated policy of his government.

Eugene Volokh convinces me in this post that Boykin's speech in these instances does not enjoy a constitutional protection. And Phil Carter believes that Boykin's remarks violate some relevant military regulations. We'll see if Boykin tries to stick it out or decides to leave his post voluntarily.

UPDATE: David Corn, guest-blogging on the Democratic National Committee's blog -- ? -- says another comparison would be if Boykin, or someone else, had gone to a religious event and argued "Judaism is a false religion." Can any of Boykin's defenders honestly say he wouldn't be outta there if that was the case?

-- Nick Confessore

WHY GEPHARDT? The Washington Post reports today that the GOP sees Dick Gephardt as the toughest opponent for Bush next year. Is this a con job to give a weak candidate a boost? An honest assessment of the rapidly changing electoral landscape? A little of both?

Here are some thoughts, based on talks with some of my sources and colleagues. To some extent, GOP consultants do think Gephardt would be a formidable adversary. He does have real strengths -- close ties to the Democratic base, credibility with working-class and even traditionalist voters in the industrial Midwest, campaign experience and discipline, and more. But the candidate they really don't want to run against is Wes Clark, whom conservatives clearly think is the most electable Democrat in the race. (Unlike some liberals, they believe -- and I suspect they're right -- that Clark's Republican past will actually be a huge asset, especially in the general election.) The conventional wisdom, however, is that despite Clark's obvious strengths, he's entered the race too late to win the nomination. So perhaps what's going on here is an effort to elevate Gephardt as an electable candidate, to try and split away some of Clark's support and make it even more unlikely that the former general will win the nomination. Then the choice becomes Gephardt versus Howard Dean.

Now, in Republican eyes, both candidates share the fatal weaknesses of having dissented from Bush's foreign policy (Gephardt after the Iraq War, Dean before and after it) and of supporting a repeal of all the Bush tax cuts. But by making Gephardt seem more electable, the GOP helps put pressure on labor to hand him an early endorsement, as the Teamsters have been pushing for -- which would hurt Dean in the short-term but also set up a real intra-Democratic split in the long- and medium-term. Some Republicans probably do think Gephardt will be a stronger candidate than Dean, precisely because he has those labor and populist credentials (his protectionist stances helps him on both counts). They probably also know that, should Gephardt win the nomination, he will be completely out of money, at which point the Bush campaign can hammer him for several months straight and overcome whatever strengths he has on the ground. Dean will have more money to fight back, but the GOP is convinced his cultural valence as a Yankee and his stance on civil unions will make him easy to beat anyway.

So, in a nutshell, the GOP strategy: Take some of the gloss away from Clark, keep the Democrats divided and the nomination undecided for as long as possible, and make sure the guy that eventually wins the nomination is beatable.

--Nick Confessore

WINNING THE YOUTH VOTE. Looks like Rock the Vote is lining up to add one more candidate forum to the Democratic primary schedule. It will be interesting to see if the candidates decide to make being there a priority. We have noted in this space before how shortsighted it was that many of the candidates skipped this year's Young Democrats of America meeting. (GOP officials have a much better sense of long-term self-interest; they know that their youth auxiliary organizations produce hardened activists and future Karl Roves -- and the party invests accordingly.) Rock the Vote has access to a demographic that most candidates need help communicating with, period; more importantly, the voters Rock the Vote reaches are the ones who do most of the ground work on a campaign. Whichever candidate does the best job capturing young voters -- and Howard Dean currently leads the pack, in part because his staff understands the Web in the same way young voters do -- will have a definite advantage.

Danny Goldberg got at this in his recent Prospect article. He wrote that during the 2000 elections:

Mario Velasquez, executive director of Rock the Vote, told me that the Gore campaign didn't even send surrogates to youth voter-registration events at which George W. Bush and Ralph Nader had representatives until a couple of months before the election. On election day, the Gore-Lieberman ticket merely tied Bush-Cheney among the 9 million people aged 18-24 who voted, a dramatic decline from the 19-point margin by which Bill Clinton had carried younger voters in 1996. If Gore had equaled Clinton's margin among that cohort, he would have added almost 2 million votes to his popular-vote count and he would have easily won Florida, Missouri and the election.

I don't think I agree with Goldberg's argument that the Democrats' loss came because kids disliked Al Gore and Joe Lieberman's attacks on the entertainment industry. But it's hard to argue with those numbers.

This may also be the first example of an advocacy group taking a page from the Dean campaign's MeetUp efforts -- Rock the Vote is promoting "watch parties" around the country to encourage young people to tune in for the Democratic debates. That's an interesting development, too.

--Nick Confessore

FILTER TIPS. The must-read of the day is Seymour Hersh's latest in The New Yorker detailing how the Bush administration's pre-war intelligence got so terribly off-track. To make a long story short, America's intelligence agencies get all sorts of communication saying all kinds of things, and so there's a process of filtering by which analysts decide which information is solid and which is garbage. The Bush administration didn't like what the filter was telling them, so they dismantled it, constructing "stovepipes" that would bring the data painting the most threatening possible portrait straight to senior officials who then relayed it to the president, the press and the public.

There's lots more in the article, including how the hawks beat the professionals into submission, why George Tenet let it happen and what, exactly, went down with Joe Wilson and the uranium from Niger. Give it a read and you'll see that while some intelligence failures are legitimate screw-ups, this one seems to have happened by design.

--Matthew Yglesias

BLOGS = CB RADIO? A FOLLOW-UP. Bruce Bartlett of the National Center for Policy Analysis e-mails some good thoughts on the uses of blogs. First, he notes:

You are right about bloggers not being reporters, but too dismissive of the importance of analyzing and interpreting the data and reportage that is out there. I suggest that bloggers are the new incarnation of I.F. Stone, who was a pretty good reporter but almost never interviewed anyone. His method was to slog through the Congressional Record and other government documents in the public domain that no other reporters ever bothered with. And he found a lot of stuff that would otherwise have been left unreported, thus confirming that the best place to hide something is in plain sight. Personally, I find blogs to be extremely valuable because they sift through publications I don't have time to read, calling my attention to news and analysis that I would otherwise know nothing about. As information on the Internet grows, I believe that this middleman function will become even more valuable in the future.

This is a crucial point and one that I didn't make in my original post. Blogs provide an intelligent filtering for useful information -- kind of like the way Amazon.com recommends books by telling you what other books or CDs were bought by people who also bought the product you just did. The danger, of course, is that having too much of your information self-selected, often by people with whom you agree, can cut you off from contrary but accurate information that might get you to change your mind. But it's certainly true that, day to day, I come across many good articles and ideas on blogs that I wouldn't normally see.

Bartlett also notes:

I think a lot of reporters object to blogs because their notion of reporting primarily means interviewing people and getting them to say quotable things. But reporting doesn't mean just that. It simply means giving people new information, however derived. Consequently, a lot of reporters tend to undervalue information that, in a sense, is in the public domain. They assume since it has been published in some form, such as in the Congressional Record, everyone (or at least their peers) know it. And of course, they are loath to acknowledge that a competitor got it first. So they tend to ignore it. Or if they find such information, they make fetish about interviewing the person involved and getting him to repeat the same material. This has happened to me many times, where a reporter will read something I wrote. But rather than simply quote my published words, he insists that I give him an interview on the exact same topic, saying what I already said slightly differently. Somehow, in the reporters mind, quoting my published words wasn't "reporting," but quoting my (almost identical) interviewed words was. In effect, reporters are cutting themselves off from a vast amount of information that bloggers are making use of. That is a big value of bloggers to me.

This is actually a pretty good description of why the Trent Lott story took so long to bubble over. Lott's connections to neo-Confederates and crypto-racists had been known for years before he reminisced fondly about Jim Crow at Strom Thurmond's birthday party. But reporters needed a news peg -- and some prodding -- to give the history a fresh look. Same with the Valerie Plame story, which only caught fire once the CIA's request for a Justice Department investigation gave reporters an excuse to write about it.

The larger and more prestigious the paper, the less likely it is to follow a smaller or less prestigious publication's lead on a story, no matter how important -- but coverage by the larger papers is what allows a story to go big. Blogs can keep stories alive until that happens.

--Nick Confessore

WORTHWHILE CANADIAN INITIATIVE. Skip the standard-issue hawkery at the beginning of former Canadian prime minister Brian Mulroney's Wall Street Journal op-ed and go directly to the conclusion:

Fifty-eight years ago, in San Francisco, statesmen gathered from around the world, facing decisions every bit as momentous as those we face today. Yet now, the U.N. is like a sheriff without a police force, unable to respond effectively to global conflict, even genocide; constrained by decision-making structures which were designed for a different age; and extending status and rights universally but with little regard to compliance with its own principles and resolutions. We know from history that international institutions that fail to act in the face of global crises gradually wither away. To help maintain world order, the U.N. needs more than a low-common-denominator consensus for action. It needs a decision-making structure that works and resources to give meaning and force to its resolutions.

In my judgment, the U.S. should instigate and lead a "San Francisco II," a major reform effort to establish new multilateral approaches that respect the principles of the U.N. Charter. It is vital for Europe, for Japan, for Canada and the world as a whole that the U.S. remains fully engaged as the bulwark for multilateralism. Without U.S. engagement, there can be no truly effective multilateral effort. But without close support and unvarnished counsel from its key allies, the U.S. will inevitably exercise its own will and choose the course of least resistance.

It would be remarkable if an institution created in 1945 -- when Britain and France ruled vast colonial empires, Joseph Stalin was running the USSR and Chiang Kai-Shek was in charge of China -- was well-designed for the 21st century. People who want to see global security handled multilaterally have a responsibility to do the work of trying to make multilateral institutions as effective as possible; otherwise the dysfunction of the United Nations creates a convenient excuse for those who'd like to ignore it anyway.

I'd like to believe that good policy also makes good politics -- but before recommending this plan to any of the Democratic candidates, it is worth noting that Mulroney was one of the most startlingly unpopular politicians in Canadian history; he essentially destroyed his political party, which is now in the process of being swallowed up by the newer, more conservtaive, Canadian Alliance.

--Matthew Yglesias

FIGHT OR DIE. That's the game for Senate Democrats, who are considering a filibuster against a mostly Republican-backed "tort reform" bill. Lawsuit restrictions are a great issue for the GOP. By restricting liability lawsuits, they starve the trial lawyers (and thus the Democrats) of campaign money while protecting their own patrons in the business world. Plus, convincing the public that the real problem is greedy trial lawyers shifts the spotlight away from corporations that manufacture shoddy products or knowingly risk public safety.

As a policy matter, however, "tort reform" -- at least the radical kind advocated by many Republicans -- is largely a fraud. Here's a good article originally from The New York Times on how most of the stories you hear about outrageous verdicts are essentially urban legends (urban legends that somehow make their way into official government reports). Here's the press release and description for a recent article in the Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy -- the article itself isn't online -- that examined jury verdicts across the nation and found that, contrary to the impression many people have, juries are not "out of control" (that is, they don't tend to fleece deep-pocketed corporations, they don't generally recommend oversize verdicts and they don't favor plaintiffs more than defendants in tort cases). And here's a Web article on the topic written by a couple of plaintiff's lawyers; it isn't neutral, obviously, but it contains citations to a raft of scholarly research debunking tort reformers' claims.

--Nick Confessore

JAILHOUSE FOREIGN POLICY. One of the neat aspects of the Iraq War is that we've gotten to hear so many different "real" justifications for the conflict. We've had weapons of mass destruction, we've had ties to terrorism, we've had human rights, we've had transforming the Middle East -- and yesterday from Jonah Goldberg we got proving we're bullies:

Q: If you're a new inmate in a rough prison, what's one of the smartest things you can do?

A: Pick a fight with the biggest, meanest cat you can -- but make sure you can win.

Q: If you're a kid and you've had enough of the school bullies pants-ing you in the cafeteria, what's one of the smartest things you can do?

A: Punch one of them in the nose as hard as you can and then stand your ground.

Q: If you're the leader of a peaceful and prosperous nation which serves as the last best hope of humanity and the backbone of international stability and a bunch of fanatics murder thousands of your people on your own soil, what's one of the smartest thing you can do?

A: Knock the crap out of Iraq.

I watched a few Oz re-runs over the weekend, so I know what Goldberg's talking about, but I think he needs to think a little harder about this. For one thing, the Iraq invasion came hot on the heels of the Afghanistan invasion, so why wasn't beating the Taliban a good enough way of proving to the world that our military can win wars if we want to? More fundamentally, proving you're a tough guy by picking a fight is supposed to scare off future attackers by making them worried you'll beat them up. This doesn't work so well if you, say, break your hand punching the other guy, even if you win.

That's roughly what's happened in Iraq. Our military won an impressive victory in the war, but as Nick Confessore has been detailing for a while (most recently here) the result has been to stretch our resources to the breaking point and give future threats of military action less credibility than they would have had otherwise. Take a look at the administration backing down from its previous tough stance on North Korea and you'll see that Operation Iraqi Freedom simply isn't scaring the rest of the world into line. Even though the United States accounts for half the world's military spending, we just don't have the resources available to go around fighting wars indiscriminately.

--Matthew Yglesias

TOLERABLE CRUELTY. Capitol Hill Republicans like to put forward the image that they run Congress like a well-oiled machine. These days, however, that image seems to be corresponding less and less with reality. That's partly because of Bush's falling poll numbers -- and the realization by a number of congressmen that loyalty to the president won't necessarily be seen by voters as a plus in 2004. But today at TAP Online, Mary Lynn F. Jones makes the argument that it's also because Republicans have gone too far in freezing Democrats out of the legislative process -- a strategy that is starting to backfire.

--TAP Online

CLARK IN KOSOVO. Laura Secor, formerly of the Prospect and lately of The Boston Globe's justly praised Ideas section, published a great article last Sunday about Wesley Clark's experience in Kosovo. Secor has a fair bit of Balkans reporting experience under her belt, and it shows: This is probably the fairest, fullest account of the various arguments over Clark's leadership that I've seen. Like other profiles of Clark, it gives you the cons. But unlike most of them, Secor's gives you enough background and context to draw your own conclusions. (My only quibble would be that, while quoting former Joint Chiefs chairman Hugh Shelton's recent public attack on Clark's character, Secor doesn't explain how Shelton misled President Clinton in order to get Clark booted from his post prematurely -- a deception that called into question Shelton's own integrity.)

If you want the unadorned pros, by the way, check out the excerpts Mark Kleiman has posted of Clark's active-duty personnel record.

--Nick Confessore

O'REILLY: NOT DONE FEELING SORRY FOR HIMSELF. Reading Bill O'Reilly's latest whiny "I'm not whining, but . . ." column, it struck me that all of the things he believes to be true cannot be true at the same time.

Over the past few months I've been smeared and pilloried, primarily by leftists who do not approve of my commentary.

I'm not whining, I'm reporting. To put things into perspective, what actors Mel Gibson and Arnold Schwarzenegger recently have suffered at the hands of the left-wing press makes my situation look like an episode of "Happy Days." These guys have been viciously attacked; even their fathers have been used against them.

In my case, the attacks are personal but designed to advance the far-left agenda.

Item: When my new book, "Who's Looking Out for You?" hit No. 1 on The New York Times best seller list, it was called an attack vehicle. In reality, it is a primer for everyday Americans on how to achieve success and stability. In the past decade, only two people have had three No. 1 nonfiction best sellers on the Times list: Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward and your humble correspondent. Yet somehow the Times has not gotten around to reviewing any of my books, while tomes by the liberal "satirists" are given major exposure.

Item: People magazine assigned a man who loathes me (I know, I know it's hard to believe) to review "Who's Looking Out for You?" News flash - he didn't like it.

Item: A National Public Radio interviewer insisted on reading that People magazine review on the air during her chat with me. When I suggested she read the very positive review in Publisher's Weekly magazine as well, she refused.

Item: Matt Lauer on the "Today" show sat smirking as one of the far-left "satirists" defamed me. When my publicist called the show asking for a chance to respond, the program turned me down.

To be fair, Barbara Walters gave me fair play on "The View" and did challenge the "satirist," so we're not talking about a left-wing monolith here. But no question, many left-wing press people have emerged from the closet and are out for blood, just as hard right-wing ideologues were during the Clinton administration. But the hard right did not have access to the elite media.

Either liberal media bias is far less pervasive than O'Reilly believes, or the elite media are far less powerful than O'Reilly (and so many other conservatives) believe. Because if liberal media bias is as pervasive as O'Reilly claims, it's hard to imagine how O'Reilly's new book has climbed to the top of the bestseller lists in the face of all this criticism -- whoops, "smearing." I mean, jeez, what with vicious hatchet-wielders like Matt Lauer, Terry Gross and -- oh, the horrors! -- People magazine on the war path, how can a top-rated television host, widely syndicated columnist and bestselling author ever get the word out?

Amazingly, NPR's ombudsman, Jeffrey Dvorkin, agrees with O'Reilly that his interview with Gross was unfair, writing:

In the Fresh Air interview, the tone was intense from the beginning. By the end of the interview, O'Reilly said he found Gross' line of questioning objectionable and hostile. He walked out of the interview, but not before he accused Gross of conducting the interview "in attack mode" and "full of typical NPR liberal bias." He also told her to "find another line of work."

Dvorkin continues:

Even so, I agree with the listeners who complained about the tone of the interview: Her questions were pointed from the beginning. She went after O'Reilly using critical quotes from the Franken book and a New York Times book review. That put O'Reilly at his most prickly and defensive mode, and Gross was never able to get him back into the interview in an effective way. This was surprising because Terry Gross is, in my opinion, one of the best interviewers anywhere in American journalism.

Although O'Reilly frequently resorts to bluster and bullying on his own show, he seemed unable to take her tough questions. He became angrier as the interview went along. But by coming across as a pro-Franken partisan rather than a neutral and curious journalist, Gross did almost nothing that might have allowed the interview to develop.

The tone was "intense"? Her questions were "pointed"? What does Gross think she is, a journalist? It's almost like reading an Onion parody of the NPR ombudsman.

BLAME GERHARD. The Weekly Standard's Victorino Matus has an informative article summarizing the contents of a recent survey of public opinion in the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland and Portugal. The news is not good. Of the European countries surveyed, only Poland has more people who approve of U.S. foreign policy than disapprove. This, one would think, reflects poorly on President Bush, but Matus blames Gerhard Schröder instead:

You get the feeling these numbers are the result of George W. Bush's foreign policy. But how much of the rift is really his fault and how much can actually be blamed on, say, Gerhard Schröder? (The Transatlantic Trends report did not ask this question.)

According to one prominent German journalist, Schröder knew all too well that if the United States needed the support of Germany in its time of need, he would have to lend his country's support without hesitation. And if not, Schröder confided to this journalist, a German chancellor would not be invited back to the White House for at least another decade. Schröder nevertheless decided to snub Bush because he and his party were in a tight race for reelection. By shifting the focus away from a staggering economy and a welfare system on the brink of collapse, and onto a defiance of U.S. saber-rattling, Schröder got just enough votes to survive--at a tremendous cost. (True, there has been a thaw in transatlantic relations lately: The U.S. and German governments have just concluded an agreement on the sharing of evidence and information regarding terrorism, Schröder backed a U.S.-sponsored resolution on Iraq last week, and President Bush recently thanked German troops for their sacrifice in Afghanistan. But these aren't exactly "Ich bin ein Berliner" moments.)

Former CDU treasurer Walther Leisler Kiep recently said he can't wait for the day when a handshake between an American president and a German chancellor will no longer be timed with a stopwatch. He may have to wait until the next German elections in 2006. Which brings us back to the pain du chocolat and Wolfgang Schäuble. "We would have handled things differently," the deputy chairman said, though he has no desire to serve as chancellor. (Rather, he has expressed interest in becoming president of Germany.) But there is no doubt in his mind that things could only get better, domestically and internationally, if Schröder were ousted. Said Schäuble with deliberate intent: "It's time for a regime change in Berlin."

Now it's true that domestic politics had something to do with Schröder's anti-war stance, but the only reason opposing the war was good politics was because Germans already disapproved of America's foreign policy. And it's really, really hard to see how Schröder could be responsible for our poor image in places -- like Italy and the UK -- where local political leaders supported the war. If conservatives want to say they don't really care that the Bush administration has alienated America from the rest of the world then they're free to do so. But like it or not, it happened. And let's be honest -- and realistic -- about whose fault it was.

--Matthew Yglesias

THOUGHTS ON EASTERBROOK. I've met Gregg Easterbrook once or twice; I work and socialize with a fair number of people who know him; and he used to work at (and still contributes to) The Washington Monthly, where I hold down a day job now. Washington journalism is a small world. Sometimes that blinds you to people's real failings. But it's also true that the smallness makes it harder to ascribe the worst motives to someone you've never met or spoken to, an occupational hazard of punditry.

As to the matter at hand: Speaking for myself, there are plenty of things Easterbrook writes day-to-day that I don't agree with. I don't agree with the overall thrust of the post in question, and I don't agree with what appears to be the intended point of the particular passage in question (that Jews, having suffered the worst act of mass violence in history, bear a special burden to resist violence in popular culture). I've read his apology and I think he both adequately explained what he was trying to express and adequately apologized for what he actually did write.

No one can know what was going through Easterbrook's head when he wrote what he wrote. And I was surprised that he didn't anticipate how his choice of words would inevitably be taken. But people do make mistakes. As Josh Marshall (who is a friend), puts it on his blog:

[W]hen something like this gets said, I think you have to look at the breadth of the writers' work. Is there a pattern? Are there other signs of an anti-Semitic mindset or animus? To the best of my knowledge, there's none. In fact, quite the opposite in this case. I take what he said in that context, as I think do his friends and colleagues.

I feel the same way. That is, I don't believe for a second that Easterbrook is, in fact, anti-Semitic, not by any stretch. (If he were, you'd think the folks at The New Republic would have smoked him out by now.) I don't even think a lot of the people criticizing Easterbrook actually think he's anti-Semitic, either. As for ESPN firing Easterbrook and deleting all his columns from their Web site like a bunch of two-bit Stalinist airbrushers -- I think that stinks to high heaven. If it turns out that this came about after pressure from Disney chief Michael Eisner (who was mentioned by name in Easterbrook's original post), I think it stinks even worse. I'm glad to see, via InstaPundit, that even Easterbrook's critics think ESPN made a bad move.

--Nick Confessore

THE VALUE OF ALLIES. Writing for The Wall Street Journal, Newt Gingrich decides that the moral of Wesley Clark's book about Kosovo, Waging Modern War, is that fighting wars through formal alliance systems doesn't work. Newt might be interested to learn that Clark has specifically confronted this misreading of his book (and the war) in a Washington Monthly article from a while back.

Of course, this wasn't a pleasant experience for any of the participants. For U.S. leaders during the war, it meant continuing dialogue, frictions, and occasional hard exchanges with some allies to get them on board. For some European leaders, the experience must have been the reverse: a continuing pressure from the United States to approve actions--to strike targets--that would generate domestic criticism at home. There was no escaping the fact that this was every government's war, that they were intrinsically part of the operation, and each was, ultimately, liable to be held accountable by its voters for the outcome.

In the darkest days before the NATO 50th anniversary summit in late April in Washington, British Prime Minister Tony Blair came to our headquarters in Belgium on very short notice. To be honest, it wasn't altogether clear why he was coming. But as he and I sat alone in my office, it quickly became apparent. "Are we going to win?" he asked me. "Will we win with an air campaign alone? Will you get ground troops if you need them?" Blair made it very clear that the future of every government in Western Europe, including his own, depended on a successful outcome of the war. Therefore, he was going to do everything it took to succeed. No stopping halfway. No halfheartedness.

That was the real lesson of the Kosovo campaign at the highest level: NATO worked. It held political leaders accountable to their electorates. It made an American-dominated effort essentially their effort. It made an American-led success their success. And, because an American-led failure would have been their failure, these leaders became determined to prevail. NATO not only generated consensus, it also generated an incredible capacity to alter public perceptions, enabling countries with even minimal capacities to participate collectively in the war. As one minister of defense told me afterwards, "Before Kosovo, you couldn't use the word 'war' in my country. War meant defeat, destruction, death, and occupation. Now it is different. We have won one!"

Conservative pundits have spent a lot of time since 9-11 bemoaning the lack of European enthusiasm for various aspects of the war on terror, but they've spent very little time asking what could actually be done to improve the situation. Clark, who, unlike Gingrich, was actually involved in the Kosovo War, says that despite the hassles created by fully involving our allies, the ultimate result was to bind them to the cause. The right seems to recognize (most of the time, at least) that it would be good to have more foreign support for U.S. policies -- but it refuses to embrace the best methods available for gaining such support.

--Matthew Yglesias

WEEKEND UPDATE. Spent the weekend under a rock? Here's what you missed:

The Columns

• David Brooks: Drops "friendly conservative" mask, says many Democrats are worse than Bashar Assad.
• Colbert King: Poverty doesn't cause terrorism, and invading Iraq won't end it.
• Thomas Friedman: Offers version 1,567 of the "real" reason for invading Iraq -- implementing the Arab Human Development Report.
• Maureen Dowd: Still hates Woody Allen.
• David Broder: Politicians are rejecting public financing of campaigns; we must respond by offering more public money.
• George Will: Extolls virtues of Colorodo Gov. Bill Owens -- Jeb Bush had better watch his back.
• Jim Hoagland: Democracy-hating intellectuals fail to realize that we must hand over power in Iraq to unelected exiles.

Op-Ed You Actually Need To Read

• Ilad Alawi, current president of the Iraq Governing Council, makes the case in The New York Times for a transfer of sovereignty sooner, rather than later, and for the reconstitution of Iraq's military and national police force.

The Shows

• Meet The Press: John McCain jabs at Howard Dean: He "has no understanding of the international role of the United States." Bob Graham argues that we shouldn't grant aid money to Iraq that will wind up lining Saudi Arabia's pockets.
• Face The Nation: Carl Levin says, "Saddam Hussein did not have in his possession the weapons that the administration said he had." Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan.) responds with obfuscation.
• This Week: Ways and Means Chairman Bill Thomas chats about Medicare with the two Georges before Joe Lieberman calls Howard Dean and Wesley Clark "rookies."

--Matthew Yglesias

BALLOTS NOT FOR SALE, AFTER ALL. South Carolina Democratic Party chairman Joe Erwin seems to have had a change of heart since telling a reporter that the cash-strapped state party had plans to sell advertising space on the primary ballots. "After I said it [to the reporter] and before anybody called us on it, we said, 'You know, that's just something were not going to do,'" says Erwin, reached by phone this afternoon. He adds, "The one thing we know we won't consider is printing the name of an advertiser on a ballot, even if it's legal, even if it doesn't violate any party rules. It doesn't pass the common-sense test."

That said, the party, according to Erwin, is looking to "engage in creative thinking" about how to finance its primary contest. South Carolina is one of only two states in the country where the state parties -- as opposed to the states themselves -- finance primary elections. The local party is in negotiations with corporate sponsors and will probably ask companies to fund specific parts of the primary, such as the printing costs of programs for the upcoming Jan. 29 presidential primary debate.

As for online fundraising, that's something the local party would love to do, Erwin says. But it would be wholly novel: Right now, there is no way for anyone to make an online donation to the South Carolina Democratic Party, should they want to.

"We're looking at that right now," Erwin says. "We're reintroducing our party Web site in the next week or two. One of the things we want to build into that Web site is space for small donor donations to come in through the Internet."

--Garance Franke-Ruta

THAT'S A NICE TOUCH. Just a couple of months ago, President Bush was lecturing the rest of the country about how "we can never take our military for granted." I'd suggest he send copies of his speech to Republican members of the House, nearly all of whom voted against an amendment this afternoon to increase the basic rate of pay to all military services by $265 million, which would be enough to provide an extra $1,500 to every American soldier serving in Iraq or Afghanistan this year. As the Center for American Progress notes, this isn't that much more money than the administration stands accused of overcharging taxpayers for -- in the words of the Newhouse News Service -- "the purchase and importation of petroleum products."

If the White House wants Congress to appropriate $87 billion more for Iraq, it's going to have to do a better job accounting for the money it's already been given.

--Nick Confessore

VOTES FOR SALE. The South Carolina Democratic Party, facing a $500,000 cash shortfall, has plans to sell advertising space on the ballots of the state's Feb. 3 primary, according to a report in The Post and Courier of Charleston (via Political Wire). This is completely appalling and just the kind of thing that's transformed the Democratic Party into the Chicago Cubs of the political world. Already, according to the article, South Carolina Republicans are having a field day:

"It's just about as absurd as they are," Luke Byars, executive director of the cash-flush state Republican Party. Republicans are enjoying a reversal of fortune: Two years ago Democratic coffers were full and the Republicans were the ones in debt.

Paul Sanford, counsel for the Washington-based Center for Responsive Politics, said selling space on election materials is probably legal, but "just because it's not illegal, it doesn't mean it's a good thing."

South Carolina Democratic Party chair and marketing executive Joe Erwin doesn't seem to quite get why this is such a bad idea:

It would be worse if the primary were canceled, Erwin said.

Sponsorships and logos "somewhat changes the nature of politics, but boy, isn't it consistent with the way things are changing?" he said.

We should all hope not. Another option would be for Erwin to think outside the box and give the good folks at MoveOn.org a call. They helped Howard Dean become the king of online small-donor fundraising, they have a demonstrated ability to raise sums like those needed by the South Carolina Dems in a day or less, and they love to give fellow Democrats advice. (Indeed, they offered their expertise last summer to all the presidential candidates, and only the Dean campaign took them up on the offer.)

Just ask Zack Exley, one of MoveOn.org's Internet gurus. "We're always giving out advice to groups about how to do online fundraising, so we'd love to talk them about this," he told me this afternoon. "I know the [state] parties are having a real hard time raising funds, and I don't want to condemn them for using adverstising. To be able to raise that kind of money on the Internet, you need a really big mailing list or lots of publicity. If this gets lots of press and they can set up online fundraising capabilites right away, maybe they would be able to raise a little bit."

And maybe they'd be able to build a base for future fundraising from actual South Carolina Democrats, rather than turning the voting booth into a forum for commercial interests.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

RETHINKING CUBA. We've done a lot of NRO-bashing here, but William F. Buckley Jr.'s column on Cuba is really very good. The prose is a bit convoluted, but he's right on the mark:

U. S. pride, brandished in Little Havana policy, doesn't make sense. Castro lives on, the penury of the Cuban people increases, and the only truth that survives is that socialist Cuba cannot withstand one thing-capitalist intervention. But only Cuban Americans, apparently, can bring on such revisions in policy as would at least permit American enterprise to bring concrete relief to Cubans, through the capitalism that scorns the pretensions of Castroism and the misery they have brought.

There's nothing unusual, of course, about an ethnic lobby exercising disproportionate influence over U.S. policy toward one country or another, but what is fairly unprecedented about America's Cuba policy is how clearly contrary it is to the goals that ethnic lobby itself claims to be seeking. Not only has the embargo failed to bring down Castro, but by providing a convenient scapegoat for the serious problems afflicting the Cuban people, it is probably helping to maintain the dictator's grip on power. At any rate, I'd be interested to see what the rest of the National Review gang thinks about their founder's welcome departure from conservative orthodoxy on this topic.

--Matthew Yglesias

DEFENDING ATHEISTS. Prospect contributing writer Chris Mooney has a piece in next Sunday's Washington Post musing over atheism and public life:

Since I left the secular humanist movement, I haven't "found religion," and I don't expect I ever will. So out of sheer personal interest, if nothing else, I want atheists to be better off in the United States. I flinch at the 1999 Gallup Poll that showed that only 49 percent of Americans would vote for a known atheist for president (59 percent would be open to supporting a homosexual), a number that I can't help thinking suggests real bigotry. I wish that most Americans could see that the non-religious, a significant minority -- some polls suggest 5 percent of the population, some much higher -- are, in the end, just ordinary people like everyone else.

Still, I've come to wonder about some of the confrontational strategies espoused by combative secularist crusaders -- strategies that the Pledge of Allegiance case typifies. Sure, the pledge is probably unconstitutional, a violation of the separation of church and state. But I'm not sure it causes anything more than minor coercion to schoolchildren (I recited it countless times myself without lasting damage) or that stripping it of religious language will redound to the benefit of America's unbelievers in the way they hope. Rather, overturning the pledge seems assured to make atheists even less popular than they already are, while dramatically distracting attention from the far more troubling entanglements of church and state that have emerged under the Bush administration.

Check out the rest here and Mooney's other columns on the topic here.

--Nick Confessore

EVEN MORE BOTULISM. About a week and a half ago I noted that the botulism discovered by David Kay in an Iraqi scientist's refrigerator -- and since discussed in speeches by the president, Dick Cheney and Colin Powell -- was more hype than threat. Today Bob Drogin of the Los Angeles Times is on the case with a few more key points:

The single vial of botulinum B had been stored in an Iraqi scientist's kitchen refrigerator since 1993. It appears to have been produced by a nonprofit Virginia biological resource center, the American Type Culture Collection, which legally exported botulinum and other biological material to Iraq under a Commerce Department license in the late 1980s.

. . .

But Dr. David Franz, a former chief U.N. biological weapons inspector who is considered among America's foremost experts on biowarfare agents, said there was no evidence that Iraq or anyone else has ever succeeded in using botulinum B for biowarfare.

"The Soviets dropped it [as a goal] and so did we, because we couldn't get it working as a weapon," said Franz, who is the former commander of the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Ft. Detrick, Md., the Pentagon's lead laboratory for bioweapons defense research.

Long story short: There's no threat here. This raises the question of why, exactly, Kay's team and the gang at the White House are trying to convince people that there is. Politically speaking, obfuscation is an effective strategy on this subject, since it's easy to get confused between the botulinum B bacteria (not dangerous, found in Iraq) and the botulinum A neurotoxin (dangerous, not found in Iraq). I myself made this mistake, but I'm not a biologist and I'm certainly not a biowarfare expert. This tactic -- saying things that are true in such a way as to get people to believe things that are false -- has become a prominent feature of the administration's public relations strategy on a number of fronts and, frankly, it stinks.

--Matthew Yglesias

A LOOK AT THE FINE PRINT. The New York Times hails yesterday's unanimous Security Council vote as "something of a diplomatic triumph for the Bush administration after months of apparent isolation here." I'm not so sure. Yes, the vote does give our occupation of Iraq some international legitimacy. (Jeanne Kirkpatrick and Richard Holbrooke, each former U.S. ambassadors to the United Nations and thus pretty informed people, seem to think it's a real step forward.) And the negotiations revealed that Germany, France and other countries that opposed the war nevertheless believe it to be in their long-term interests to see Iraq transition into a stable, democratic country. But the Times also says:

As soon as the United Nations resolution passed, several late converts --including France, Germany and Pakistan -- made clear that it was still too flawed, in their view, to spur any contributions of troops or money beyond current assistance.

Pakistan, a Muslim nation, was one of the countries that Washington had hoped would contribute troops.

Russia, France and Germany, the countries that had most visibly opposed the war, issued a joint statement saying, "We believe that the resolution should have gone further on two major issues: first, the role of the United Nations, in particular in the political process, and second, the pace of the transfer of responsibilities to the Iraqi people."

Those comments made it clear that the resolution did little more than paper over the fundamental differences dividing the United States from many Council members, who contended that the measure should have mandated a quick, time-limited transfer of responsibilities from the coalition authorities to the Iraqis.

That means the resolution is not going to bring us a lot of new help, in the form of either cash assistance or troop reinforcements from other countries. The Washington Post says as much in a somewhat more skeptical account:

The 15 to 0 vote, bringing in not just France, Germany and Russia but also Syria, was no small feat. But analysts and diplomats said the impact of the resolution would be limited, and perhaps not worth its cost of exposing the deep-seated resentments in the world community over the U.S. handling of the Iraq war. Few believe the Security Council's resolution will bring much in terms of pledges of troops or aid, even though the Bush administration originally sought the resolution for precisely that reason.

So maybe not such a success, after all.

--Nick Confessore

UNIFORM SPEECH. The Pentagon rolled out its defense today of a general who has characterized the war on terrorism as a conflict between Christianity and Satan. I'll get to what Donald Rumsfeld had to say in a minute. First, some background on Army Lt. Gen. William Boykin, from The Associated Press:

Army Lt. Gen. William G. Boykin has made several speeches -- some in uniform -- at evangelical Christian churches in which he cast the war on terrorism in religious terms. Boykin said of a 1993 battle with a Muslim militia leader in Somalia: "I knew that my God was bigger than his. I knew that my God was a real God, and his was an idol."

And from Reuters:

In another speech, Boykin said God selected George W. Bush as president.

"Why is this man in the White House? The majority of Americans did not vote for him. Why is he there? And I tell you this morning that he's in the White House because God put him there for a time such as this."

Describing America's fight with Islamic extremists, Boykin also said, "The enemy is a spiritual enemy. He's called the principality of darkness. The enemy is a guy called Satan."

Now for Rumsfeld's explanation as to why this is all OK by him (from the AP article):

"We're a free people. And that's the wonderful thing about our country," Rumsfeld said. "I think that for anyone to run around and think that that can be managed and controlled is probably wrong. Saddam Hussein could do it pretty well, because he'd go around killing people if they said things he didn't like."

Of course the man has the right to say whatever he wants in his spare time, but when you put on a uniform, the rules change, as well they should. Boykin is not some guy standing on a soapbox at the corner screaming about the battle between God and Satan. He is an Army general who happens to be the country's deputy undersecretary of defense for intelligence, making public speeches about the war on terrorism, the single most important issue of our time, and embarrassing our country in the process. It's just not possible for Rumsfeld to argue that his actions are protected by the First Amendment.

If the Pentagon will not dismiss Boykin, then he ought to be immediately reassigned to a military post in a remote, barren part of the world, far far away from any pulpits or reporters. There, he'll be free to say whatever he wants.

--Alison Leff

THEN AND NOW. I've been waiting and waiting and waiting to see what, exactly, about Bill Clinton's legacy has Rich Lowry so hot and bothered. (The title of his new book is Legacy: Paying the Price for the Clinton Years.) Clearly, he was going to claim that Clinton didn't deserve credit for the good economy of the 1990s, even though it would be hard to argue that Clinton did much damage. Today, however, the truth comes out -- Lowry blames Clinton for September 11:

Well, obviously, Osama bin Laden was responsible for 9/11. But the September 11th attacks were clearly Clinton's most consequential legacy. The way he had hamstrung the CIA, handcuffed the FBI, neglected airport security, and, most importantly, left a nest of terrorist training camps in Afghanistan unmolested -- knowing, knowing they were there -- created the ticking time bomb that went off on September 11th. Should Bush have done more during the eight months he was in office? Absolutely. But much of his work would have been -- and has been -- undoing the mistakes of the Clinton administration.

Ah. So back before 9-11 can we presume that National Review was advocating an invasion of Afghanistan and condemning the Clinton administration for not undertaking one? Not exactly. I fired up Nexis and found an unsigned editorial titled, "Counterstrike," from the September 14, 1998 issue:

Congressional leaders were therefore right to support President Clinton's action. The last thing Republicans should do is add to the inhibitions and hesitations of an Administration congenitally averse to the forthright use of American military power. The White House's blatant exploitation of the crisis for its own political purposes--dragging Mr. Clinton back from vacation for a portentous Oval Office address to the nation--should be a source of amusement only. Richard Nixon, too, tried to claim indispensability for his foreign-policy expertise--a much more valid claim in his case, and at the height of the Cold War to boot. It didn't help him.

Launching 75 Tomahawk cruise missiles at the training camp in Afghanistan and the chemical-weapons plant in Sudan was, by Clinton standards, a strong performance. In June 1993, responding to an Iraqi assassination attempt against ex-President George Bush, Mr. Clinton launched 23 cruise missiles at a military-intelligence headquarters in Baghdad--in the middle of the night, so that no one would get hurt! This time, the strike in Afghanistan was aimed at a gathering of terrorist leaders reported to be taking place on that day. Admirably cold-blooded, that.

Bin Laden, the terrorist kingpin, is a new phenomenon, but we should not exaggerate either his novelty or the difficulty of defeating him. (There is a canard that he is an American creation. There is no evidence that he is. He did win his spurs in the Arab world's equivalent of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade--the war against the Soviets in Afghanistan--but U.S. money and arms went to the Afghan freedom fighters through the Pakistani military.) While he is a freelancer, bin Laden is dependent on the support of renegade governments, such as Afghanistan's and Sudan's, against which we have leverage. We can target his physical assets by military or covert means and his financial assets through other controls (as Mr. Clinton has also done). His Islamist revolutionary ideology is increasingly discredited in the Muslim world, even in Iran. Defeating him will take time, but it will be done.

As this fairly clearly shows, the debate at the time was focused on whether or not the Clinton administration had gone too far in combating al-Qaeda, and National Review, to its credit, supported Clinton's position. But what of the Clinton administration's response to the USS Cole bombing, another major trope in the right's retrospective criticism of the administration? A Nexis search reveals that though the attack on the ship has been mentioned many times since 9-11 in Lowry's magazine, it was mentioned exactly three times before then. First, from the Dec. 31, 2000 issue:

According to press reports, the navy is evaluating the results of its internal investigation into last October's devastating attack on the destroyer USS Cole. Preliminary indications are that the ship's captain, Cmdr. Kirk S. Lippold, did not ensure full implementation of the ship's required force-protection plan. One senior officer cites evidence of a "lapse of attentiveness" on the part of the Cole's crew. But the inquiry raises as many questions as it answers: Why, for example, did the Cole enter an area of acknowledged terrorist activity operating under Threat Condition Bravo--the Pentagon's second lowest security status? Who bears responsibility for designing the misguided "strategy of engagement" that obliged the Cole to stop at Aden in the first place? Secretary of Defense William Cohen has appointed two senior retired officers to conduct a more wide-ranging examination; their report is expected by early January. It is critically important that these officers complete their task free of political interference. The administration should not be allowed to make Kirk Lippold a scapegoat.

Then at the end of a May 25, 2001 article by Jeffrey Hart dedicated to reviewing the history of America's involvement in World War II:

A state of readiness is difficult to maintain, especially when the nation is officially at "peace." Who would imagine that an unidentified small motorboat could with impunity sail right up alongside our destroyer USS Cole in the harbor at Yemen?

Then there was a July 26, 2001 NRO interview by Kathryn Lopez of Bill Sammon, a Washington Times White House correspondent and author of At Any Cost: How Al Gore Tried To Steal The Election. Sammon's final remark:

Two Gore lawyers high-fived each other after helping disqualify more than 1,400 military ballots on trumped-up hyper technicalities. One of the ballots had been cast by Navy Lt. John Russell, who had volunteered to rescue the USS Cole in the wake of a deadly terrorist strike. When a sickened Republican asked the high-fiving Gore lawyers how they could possibly celebrate the disenfranchisement of our military, one of them crowed: "A win's a win."

That's it. Look, if the Bush administration is right about one thing, it's this: September 11 changed everybody's perspective. I would argue that before 9-11 Democrats were more focused on terrorism than Republicans (most of whom seemed overly enamored with missile defense and great-power politics) but it's clear -- in retrospect -- that it would have been nice if both the Clinton and Bush administrations had done more to combat al-Qaeda. By and large, liberals have resisted the temptation to play the 9-11 blame game, but obviously the folks at National Review have no intention of extending us the same courtesy. If that's the game they want to play, let me recommend the "Operation Ignore" chapter of Al Franken's new book for a fairly devastating critique of George W. Bush's pre-9-11 counterterrorism strategy.

--Matthew Yglesias

BLOGGING = CB RADIO? That's what The New York Times' Jim Markhoff says in this Online Journalism Review interview. Frankly, I think he's more or less right. When it comes to news, blogging doesn't hold a candle to the reporters working their butts off every day at papers around the country. That doesn't mean blogs are unimportant. But bloggers rarely break any news -- I can think of only a handful that consistently bring fresh reporting to the table, and likewise not that many big stories have been broken by blogs (though blogs have helped keep interest in some previously reported stories, like the Trent Lott controversy, burning long enough to have a second life among the professional-class punditry). The fun of reading blogs is to watch smart, well-informed people chew over, interpret or re-interpret stuff they've read in the paper or elsewhere. But if you got rid of the "old" print media, what would bloggers blog about?

Seriously, I'm asking. Thoughts welcome.

--Nick Confessore

THE COMING CRISIS. The Washington Post reports here on a poll by Stars and Stripes (a Pentagon-sponsored newspaper) of U.S. soldiers in Iraq. It contains some pieces of good news, among them that in a lot of areas -- from their health to their living conditions -- U.S. soldiers feel their situation is at least OK. But there are also some pieces of very, very bad news. Forty-nine percent of all soldiers now in Iraq say it is either "not likely" or "very unlikely" that they will stay in the military after their current obligation is complete; the same number rate their unit's morale as "low" or "very low." Thirty-five percent feel that their mission is mostly not clearly defined or not clearly defined at all. Forty percent say that their current mission is either not closely related or not at all related to their training.

These results are discouraging, though not surprising. They are what you get when you assign combat troops to be police officers, in a country where they don't have the resources and manpower to perform the assigned mission, and are viewed with growing hostility by the local population. Peacekeeping is an essential part of the U.S. military mission today, and will be for the foreseable future, but the truth is that people who spend their days training to kill bad guys don't have a lot of enthusiasm for it. There are a couple of long-term solutions to this problem, such as forming a new military service devoted entirely to peacekeeping and nation-building work. But the short-term solution is in some ways more difficult, because it would represent such a reversal, however necessary, of the administration's policy so far: We need help. And the administration should be willing to make a lot of concessions to get it.

The alternative is a gradual cannibalization of the same armed forces for which the White House professes so much affection. Our occupation, at least for the moment, is creating a vicious circle: Because our active and reserve forces are overcommitted, our soldiers are exhausted and overworked. Because they are exhausted and overworked, a growing number of them are planning not to re-enlist. And the more soldiers that decide not to re-enlist, the more exhausted and overworked will be those who remain. We're basically burning through our reserves in the short-term in the hope that the problem will eventually work itself out. Over time, this will present the Pentagon with a major crisis. It's more than just not having enough troops to meet all the commitments we have now or will need to take on later, though that's a big part of it. You also have to consider how the vicious circle saps the strength, morale and efficacy of our armed forces over time. The whole thing is a disaster waiting to happen.

That this would be a problem was obvious well before the Iraq War, at least to those military wonks and officers I spoke to for this article last March. I think it was obvious to the senior brass, as well, who were overruled by over-optimistic civilians at the Pentagon. Keep in mind that the Stars and Stripes survey was taken in August, and that the problems about which soldiers are most concerned have not improved much.

Phil Carter has some more thoughts here.

--Nick Confessore

STUPID WHITE MAN, AND MORE FROM AROUND THE BLOGS. Our friends at Spinsanity have a ton of good stuff up these days. Check out their two-part rundown (here and here) of the many factual errors in Michael Moore's latest tome, Dude, Where's My Country?; this account of another apparent Bill O'Reilly fib; and their fact-checking of recent newspaper columns about Howard Dean (here) and Wes Clark (here). Brian Montopoli has more on Dean and media coverage here. Daniel Davies at Crooked Timber has launched a running tab on "particularly egregious examples of breathless and/or mendacious 'Globalisation' pieces from neo-liberal commentators" here; he will no doubt have little trouble finding them. I'm sure that Mickey Kaus, having smacked the Prospect's Michael Tomasky for making -- egads! -- an election prediction in this article, will go forth and administer a bloggy drubbing to the approximately four trillion other pundits who likewise called the California race wrong. CalPundit rounds up the latest Valerie Plame news so you don't have to -- and asks what big-time GOP lobbyist and Mississippi gubernatorial candidate Haley Barbour is doing hanging with the good people at the Council of Conservative Citizens. R.J. West notes that all kinds of people seem to end up speaking before the council without knowing what the group is really about . . . sure. And Atrios celebrates New Jobless Day here. Hey, you know who you are!

--Nick Confessore

THE MALAYSIAN PRIME MINISTER: CLASSY GUY. At this point, it can hardly count as noteworthy when Mahathir Mohamad, the long-time dictator of Malaysia, opens his mouth and something anti-Semitic comes out. The prime minister has been peddling anti-Semitism for a long time -- most famously when he tried to pin the 1997 Asian economic meltdown on Jews -- and today he's at it again, telling delegates from 57 nations at the Organization of the Islamic Conference summit that "Jews rule the world by proxy."

That phrase will grab headlines briefly, and every sane person -- left, right, center -- will condemn it as bigotry, which it is. The problem is that the rest of the speech -- in which Mahathir condemned suicide bombings and called on the Muslim world to stop blaming outsiders for its problems -- will be understood by many in the West as moderate, or even courageous. But the truth is that these parts of the speech were perhaps even more chilling than the out-and-out anti-Semitic sections, because they sounded suspiciously like a blueprint for targeting Jews by other, more subtle means. "We cannot fight them through brawn alone. We must use our brains also," Mahathir said of Jews. He also encouraged Palestinians to negotiate, noting that the Prophet Muhammad did -- and "in the end, he triumphed." Plus, he implored Muslims to devote themselves to technology, which sounded like a call for education reform in the Muslim world, and qualified as that . . . well, sort of -- if you count an exhortation to would-be Muslim scientists that "we need guns and rockets, bombs and warplanes, tanks and warships for our defense" as a call to reform.

Why is this so disturbing? Because most people understand the statement "Jews rule the world by proxy" as anti-Semitism, but many will miss the fact that Mahathir denounced suicide bombings, while pointedly not denouncing -- and indeed, amplifying -- hatred of Jews. To give an example: Here's how one reporter, covering the speech for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, described it:

Yes, it's nothing new for him to attack Jews and Europeans and pinpoint them for the blame for many of the ails of the Muslim world. But at the same time, his rhetoric was going the other way, and to a large extent he was saying that the Muslim world are the architects of their own problems.

And much of what he said in the rest of the speech was a rallying call, trying to get Muslims to stop blaming other people and to start confronting their own economic and social problems in order to develop and get themselves out of the poverty trap.

I suspect this reporter's analysis will be shared by news outlets in much of the western world. What they'll ignore was that Mahathir was only calling on those who hate Jews to reform their tactics, not their goals. To borrow a phrase that Palestinian partisans are fond of using, Mahathir wasn't addressing the "root causes" of the Muslim world's conflict with Israel.

And what are those root causes? Obviously, they're many and they're complex and no one can quite agree on what they are and if we could things would be a lot easier. But no one -- especially those of us who supported Oslo and still hope for peace -- should deny that one of the very central, ongoing root causes of the Israeli-Palestinian dispute is the enduring, and, I would argue, in many ways justified, Israeli fear that even if the Palestinians someday go back to the bargaining table, they will be negotiating not for a two-state solution but rather for the destruction of Israel by other means. When career anti-Semites like Mahathir give speeches in which they basically come out and say that Muslims need to go on fighting Jews, only through the more brainy, less gruesome tactics of non-violence and negotiation, they lend a lot of credence to the long-held Israeli suspicion that Muslim countries are not seeking peace in good faith. What other conclusion can Israelis possibly draw from a speech that implores Muslims to give up suicide bombings but notes that "1.3 billion Muslims cannot be defeated by a few million Jews," calls on Muslims to achieve a "final victory" in the struggle against Jews, is delivered by the dictator of a country that could have no possible legitimate beef with Israel, is awarded a standing ovation by representatives from 57 Muslim nations, and is praised by the foreign minister of Egypt, which is ostensibly at peace with Israel?

All this comes on the heels of an announcement that a team of liberal Israelis, led by one-time Prospect contributor Yossi Beilin, has negotiated an unofficial framework for peace with a team of Palestinians. You could say the plan is a step forward -- I want it to be a step forward -- but it won't be much of a step unless the majority of Israelis look favorably on it. So the operative question is this: Will Israelis rush to back a peace plan at a time when a pretty nutty anti-Semite can still get a standing ovation from a conference of Islamic nations for calling on them to continue their struggle against Jews? Those who truly want peace should ask themselves why Israelis feel so insecure in the world that they keep eschewing the Beilins of their political system in favor of tough guys like Sharon. I suggest they consider Mahathir's speech, and the reaction it received, as Exhibit A.

--Richard Just

A SPECIAL TIME. I seem to recall having heard somewhere that the difference between Republican calls for independent counsels to investigate Bill Clinton and Democratic calls for a special prosecutor to look into the Valerie Plame situation was that the GOP position was supported by career prosecutors who felt that Janet Reno couldn't get the job done right. Well, there goes that difference, as The New York Times quotes "top FBI officials" and criminal prosecutors from the DOJ criticizing John Ashcroft's handling of the situation and calling for either a recusal or a special counsel.

It's important to remember that a special counsel and an independent counsel aren't the same thing. I think the latter would be a bad idea (for reasons that people should be able to recall from the late 1990s) whereas the former may well be necessary. Still, it's worth noting yet again that the ostensible position of the White House is that it does not defend the conduct in question and wants to see the perpetrators found and appropriately disciplined. Any time Bush officials want to start acting like that's what they really think, this whole issue could become moot.

--Matthew Yglesias

MORE ON THAT "BOUNCE." I noted yesterday that contrary to what The Washington Post's headline writers want you to believe, Bush's poll numbers are going down. Public opinion expert Ruy Teixeira has taken an even closer look at a number of recent polls and come to the same conclusion:

The Gallup data also show just 22 percent rating the economy as good or excellent, one of the worst rating of his presidency, and only 42 percent saying the situation in Iraq is going well, the lowest level of the year. Finally, sentiment has become more negative about whether Congress should authorize the additional $87 billion for Iraq and the war on terror, moving from 51 percent against/46 percent for to 57 percent against/41 percent for.

In the Newsweek poll, Bush's approval ratings on foreign policy are 45 percent, on Iraq, 44 percent, on taxes, 43 percent, on the environment, 43 percent, on the economy, 38 percent and on health care, 34 percent. And on whether Bush should be re-elected or not, 44 percent say they would vote to re-elect him, but 50 percent would not–worse than where Bush was two weeks ago before the beginning of this so-called bounce.

The Newsweek poll also finds that, at this point, more Americans (37 percent) think the US action against Iraq will increase the risk that large numbers of Americans will be killed or injured in future terror attacks, than believe (25 percent) that risk will decrease (30 percent say the Iraq action will make no difference). Moreover, by 49 percent to 39 percent, the public now thinks the administration misinterpreted or misanalyzed intelligence reports about Iraq's WMDs and, for the first time, as many Americans now believe the administration purposely misled the public about Iraq's WMDs to build support for war as believe they did not.

The Post poll finds Bush doing worse than a month ago in terms of support for his re-election. More (47 percent) say they would vote for the Democratic nominee than say they would vote for Bush (46 percent). The number who say the war in Iraq was worth fighting also fell 7 points to 54 percent in the same time period and the number who say the number of military casualties in Iraq is unacceptable rose 4 points to 59 percent, the highest level since the war began.

That said, a few words of caution are appropriate. Bush is doing worse in the polls than his father was at this point, and better than Bill Clinton was. Clinton, of course, won, and the first Bush lost, so there's no reason to think these latest polls tell us anything incredibly important about who's going to win next November. Still, that's no reason for the Post to get its headlines wrong.

--Matthew Yglesias

TRY AGAIN. The conservative intellectuals whose work fills magazines and op-ed pages find themselves in a sticky situation when the topic turns to homosexuality. On the one hand, these guys aren't bigots or religious fanatics, but on the other hand, their base demands that they stand up for conservative opposition to gay rights. As a result, you get to see some interesting intellectual contortions. Case in point: David Frum in The Wall Street Journal tries to make the case that permitting same-sex marriages will reduce the "seriousness" of the institution. Except that if you read the article, you'll see that he ends up inadvertently making a good case for gay marriage.

He notes that many jurisdictions have, in an attempt to respond to demands for gay equality without permitting gay marriage, created various sorts of ersatz arrangements like Vermont's civil unions. According to Frum, it's these in-between situations that undermine marriage because they eliminate the bright line between married and not married and replace it with a continuum. Frum may be right about this, but if he is right, that's an argument in favor of permitting gay marriage because that would eliminate the need for the continuum. Preventing same-sex weddings, after all, isn't going to stop gays and lesbians from entering into committed relationships, and it's the Frums of the world who are forcing such couples to stay stuck between singlehood and matrimony.

--Matthew Yglesias

THE ECUMENICISM OF CLINTON-HATING. It's always been true that some of the most energetic dislike of Bill Clinton has existed on the left. And it's interesting, albeit not that surprising, to see some of that antipathy passing on to Wesley Clark. One good example is this piece by James Ridgeway that I came across in The Village Voice:

Clark embodies just about everything the right wing hates, and he will no doubt become another ingredient in the president's re-election strategy to fire up the conservative base. Clark is despised by various elements in the military as a grandstander. His battle tactics in Kosovo are questioned by numerous critics on both the right and left: he kept American casualties low by raining bombs randomly from 30,000 feet on civilian targets.

If that's the critique, then the critics in question are idiots. (I'll leave aside Ridgeway's odd assertion that Clark represents everything conservatives hate -- much of Clark's appeal to professional Democrats is his potential to attract centrists and Republicans.) One can legitimately criticize Clark's decision, made under political pressure, to keep American pilots above the altitude at which they'd be vulnerable to most ground fire, which ensured their safety (not a single American serviceman died in Kosovo) while making it relatively harder to accurately hit targets on the ground. But rest assured that NATO pilots didn't "randomly" drop anything. Quite the opposite: What made Clark's job as NATO commander so difficult, and what makes his eventual success noteworthy, was that every bombing target had to be approved by all 19 countries in the alliance. (You can read more on that here.) More to the point, such was the accuracy of U.S. weapons technology that, on the whole, the bombing campaign incurred relatively few civilian deaths, although as in any war, some targeting of civilian resources, like bridges and power plants, was necessary for victory. But the United States did save tens of thousands of civilian lives by ending Slobodan Milosevic's campaign of slaughter -- something too many American left-liberals refused to give Clinton or Clark credit for.

Next Ridgeway writes:

Clinton denies it, but just about everybody thinks he and Hillary are behind Clark's sudden appearance on the political stage. The former president's old campaign staff and aides are pretty much running Clark's operation. But Slick Willy always hedges his bets. Clark might have been the former president's commander in Kosovo, but Clinton has been accused of forcing the general into retirement. You can be sure that if Clark stumbles, Clinton will drop him like a hot potato.

Clinton-haters always have paranoid tendencies, but then again, Ridgeway is not the only one to overplay the importance of the handful of former Clinton staffers on Clark's campaign. Obviously Clinton has some interest in Clark, but there are literally hundreds of former Clinton aides and campaign staffers in Washington, and you can find them working for or advising all the key Democratic presidential campaigns.

But it's Ridgeway's second assertion in the paragraph that most needs correction, because it's untrue. Note that Ridgeway puts his charge -- "has been accused" -- in the passive voice, so he doesn't have to take responsibility for it. The facts, though, are pretty clear here: Clinton was hoodwinked by senior Pentagon officials, who disliked Clark precisely because he had successfully prosecuted a war they had opposed from the beginning. As Spencer Ackerman wrote in this excellent New Republic piece a few weeks ago:

Clark's tactical and strategic wisdom went unappreciated inside the Beltway. He was rewarded for his win in Kosovo by a terse call from Shelton the following month informing him that his nato assignment would end early. (According to Waging Modern War, Shelton would not even show Clark the courtesy of extending the phone call a few minutes to work out a face-saving exit.) Clinton privately told Clark, "I had nothing to do with it."

The rest of the article is quite good, too, albeit obviously written from a pretty pro-Clark stance. Ackerman does a good job of explaining the war, the reluctance of the Pentagon brass to be involved in it, the obstacle posed by Clinton's wariness of casualties, and the Pristina airport incident for which Clark drew some criticism when he first entered the race.

It's significant, though, that Ridgeway -- who represents thinking not uncommon on the lefty-left -- would choose to criticize Clark for poor handling of the Kosovo war. American success there is one of those Clinton-era achievements that the Democratic Party as a whole should be claiming as part of the record it presents to voters in 2004. But there's as much resistance on the Democratic left to giving the Clinton administration credit for anything as there is on the right. It's an intellectual incoherence liberal Democrats are going to have to resolve if they want to win in 2004.

--Nick Confessore

DEAN AND THE WEB. Tuesday's Wall Street Journal had one of the best, most comphrensive and most clued-in newspaper articles I've seen on the Dean campaign's inventive use of MeetUps, blogging and Internet fundraising to get an edge in the Democratic primary. Much of this will be familiar to people who've read my colleague Garance Franke-Ruta's recent Prospect cover story on the topic. But the Journal article, by Jeanne Cummings, definitely adds some value:

On March 5, the campaign held its first official meetup in New York. The Essex Restaurant was told to prepare for 200 people, but 500 mobbed it, with more in a line outside. Mr. Dean emerged from his taxi and froze. "I was just shocked, stunned," he recalls. "I didn't understand the implications of [the meetups]. [Joe] Trippi understood it immediately."

The campaign still lacked money or manpower and had only one Internet expert. But virtual-world supporters soon showed up on the campaign's real-world doorstep.

Mathew Gross, a 31-year-old environmental activist living in Moab, Utah, had been praising Mr. Dean on blogs for months. In March, he quit his job serving burritos and flew east to join the Dean campaign -- without calling ahead.

After stopping to buy a $10 tie, he took a cheap motel room in Burlington, near campaign headquarters. On his first day as a volunteer, he stuffed envelopes. That night he stayed up late writing a memo on the importance of blogs. The next morning, he marched toward Mr. Trippi's office to deliver it, pausing at the door just long enough for senior aides to start escorting him away. Mr. Gross threw the memo toward the boss. "I write on MyDD!" he shouted, guessing Mr. Trippi would understand.

Mr. Trippi's head shot up. "You're hired!" he yelled back.

Whether or not Dean wins the nomination, the Democratic establishment in Washington would be smart to find a place for Joe Trippi -- either as head of the Democratic National Committee or in some senior post at the organization. (And as Harold Meyerson pointed out in this column, the Democrats should be thinking about ways to make sure the people Dean has drawn into the political process stay there.) For decades, the Democrats have lagged behind the Republicans in the area of party building. And while I think Terry McAuliffe has been vastly underrated in this department -- largely by shortsighted Democrats looking for an easy scapegoat after the '02 debacle -- Trippi is obviously a guy who can think outside the box.

And it's not unimportant that he has an intuitive feel for the technology. You'd be surprised by how many people in Washington don't. This anecdote, from the Cummings piece, is telling:

[Wes] Boyd offered MoveOn's expertise to all the Democratic contenders. Only the Dean campaign accepted, paying MoveOn employee Zack Exley's salary for two weeks. Mr. Exley, 33, made the Dean Web site more user-friendly and preached about e-mail's organizing and fund-raising power.

The advice took hold. In June, the campaign launched its first serious Internet fund-raising effort. Nine days before the second quarter closed on June 30 -- a key moment for measuring each presidential contender's viability -- Mr. Trippi appealed to everyone on the campaign's e-mail list. The list now had 150,000 addresses, thanks in part to the Meetup deal.

This was a key turning point, and an opportunity every other campaign obviously missed. Trippi understood the possibility this represented, especially among young people. My own personal experience, which may not ring true for others, is that people who first started using e-mail and the Web after college rather than during or before it have a different, less intuitive feel for the Internet and its possibilities as a tool for social organization than those whose first introduction to the Web came at an early age. At 47, Trippi obviously didn't grow up with the Internet, but his work consulting for dot.coms seems to have given him an edge over other professional campaign operatives.

--Nick Confessore

READ THE WHOLE THING. When I saw an article in The Washington Post headlined, "President Rallying Support in Polls," I was foolish enough to assume that it was about some kind of new poll showing a rally in support for the president. Read the poll results, however, and you'll see that the president's approval rating is actually down one point from the previous Post/ABC poll. In fairness, his disapproval rating is also down -- by two points -- and this is all within the margin of error, so it's not terrible news for the president. But it's hardly a Marlins-esque rally, either. The poll also shows only 46 percent of the public planning to vote for Bush in 2004, as opposed to 47 percent who plan to vote for the Democrat. Last time the poll was conducted, Bush was winning 49-44. A few more rallies like this and the president is going to be out of a job.

--Matthew Yglesias

DEFENDING DEAN. Terry Eastland has penned a column condemning Howard Dean for saying that since he's not a member of Congress he wouldn't say how he would vote on the president's $87 billion Iraq request:

By that logic, Dean needn't answer any question on which a member of Congress might vote. But does the candidate really believe his logic? During the Times interview, Dean also urged the repeal of recent tax cuts to pay for the reconstruction on which he wouldn't opine. Obviously, there could be no such repeal unless Congress approved it, and Dean surely wouldn't want to be understood as saying he has no view on whether a member should vote for or against a course of action he unequivocally has endorsed.

Dean has taken an unconvincing pass on the most important foreign policy question before the country.

Eastland seems to be willfully missing the point here. Dean has given a perfectly clear answer to the most important foreign policy question before the country: He thinks we ought to appropriate $87 billion for Iraq and that we ought to finance it by canceling tax cuts. Bush has also given a clear answer to this question: He thinks we ought to appropriate $87 billion for Iraq and that we ought to finance it by borrowing money and raising taxes on future generations. The question Dean didn't answer was: Forced to choose between the borrow-and-spend approach and the don't-spend approach, which would he prefer? Note that Bush hasn't answered his version of that question either: Faced with a choice between canceling some of the tax cuts and not getting the appropriation, what would the president choose?

Eastland's argument would have been pretty silly even if the underlying facts of his allegation were true -- but, as it turns out, they aren't. According to this morning's Washington Post:

Last week in a New York Times interview, Dean declined to take a position on the spending request. But the next day, in a debate in Arizona, he said he would oppose the $87 billion request unless Bush accepted an equivalent reduction in his tax cuts.

This is, I think, the wrong position on the $87 billion request. (Though, as a tactical measure, it's probably what I would say if I were a member of Congress, in the hope that this way we could get the best possible solution -- spending without borrowing.) But whether or not you agree with Dean, what he said was really pretty clear.

--Matthew Yglesias

MAJORITY RULES. Kudos to The Wall Street Journal for recognizing that Democratic opposition to Bush's judicial nominees has nothing to do with race, gender or religion (as so many other conservatives would have us believe) and everything to do with his nominees' view of the law. On the other hand, I think the Journal could use a refresher course in the meaning of the term "majority":

The only thing these nominees have in common is that they were nominated by a GOP President and share a conservative view of the law. Far from being radical or extreme, their views are shared by tens of millions of Americans--a majority if the results of the past two elections count for something. If Democrats want to dictate who can sit on the federal bench, they can always take the issue to the voters and win either a Senate majority or the White House. They shouldn't be allowed to hijack the confirmation process.

As you may recall, during the 2000 presidential election, one candidate received more votes than his opponents, and that man did not go on to become president. When you add in the votes for Ralph Nader, the election hardly amounts to a ringing popular endorsement of Bush's judicial philosophy. As for the Senate, let me refer you to this post by Nathan Newman from several months ago, which pointed out that Senate Democrats represent over 50 million more people than Senate Republicans. Even when you add in Miguel Estrada's Democratic support, the filibustering minorty was still representing most Americans, according to Newman. Legally speaking, of course, neither of these facts is relevant. The law is the law and it says George W. Bush is president and Bill Frist leads the Senate's majority. But the law also says the Democratic minority can filibuster if it's so inclined, and considerations of majoritarianism give it no reason not to.

--Matthew Yglesias

CLEAR SKIES AHEAD? Congressional Democrats are charging the Environmental Protection Agency with misusing federal funds. At issue is a series of advertisements launched on the Spanish-language Hispanic Radio Network; the ads basically promoted the Bush administration's so-called "Clear Skies" legislation, which may be a violation of federal law. (Here's a primer on "Clear Skies" from Bill Moyers' show, Now.)

From The Washington Post's description, the whole thing doesn't seem too complex. The EPA's appropriations bill precludes the agency from spending any of its money on advocacy for or against legislation. Any experts out there care to weigh in?

--Nick Confessore

THE REAL DEBATE. David Broder raises a worthwhile point in his latest column: The GOP will probably remain in control of the House after the 2004 elections, so any Democratic economic plan is going to need the support of some House Republicans. But then Broder goes a step too far. He argues that the likelihood of Republican control in the House makes a good deal of the debate between the various Democratic candidates about how much of the Bush tax cut to cancel a bit academic, since none of them is realistically going to be able to get what he or she wants. Broder goes on to say that trade policy is the real debate we should be paying attention to:

If a Gephardt or a Dean were in the White House, it is not hard to imagine a sharp change from the liberal trade policies of Clinton and Bush -- no matter which party is in control of Congress. Restrictive policies would be resisted -- and perhaps thwarted -- by a Kerry or a Lieberman.

I'm not so sure about this. For one thing, what "liberal trade policies" has Bush been responsible for? Steel tariffs? Farm subsidies? A round of WTO negotiations that was scuttled after the rich countries refused to address the concerns of poor countries? At the same time, given the dynamics of a Democratic primary, it's hard to know how seriously to take the candidates' positions on trade. Dean used to be a free trader, now he's not, and who knows what he'd really do in the White House. The fact is that the trade skeptics in the race have been putting forward proposals -- such as renegotiating NAFTA to require higher Mexican labor and environmental standards -- that aren't any more realistic than getting a Republican Congress to approve tax increases.

Which brings us back to the relevance of the tax debate in the primaries. Assuming the Democrats take the White House and the Republicans keep Congress, it's likely that some of the Bush tax cut will be repealed, but more of it will stay than the next president wants. The Democratic stance during the campaign, however, is going to serve as an opening offer in a negotiating process, so it's hardly irrelevant. In particular, a president who can win a mandate from the public for repealing all the Bush tax cuts is going to have a much easier time coercing wavering Republicans to support a partial repeal. On the other hand, it may well be impossible to win a mandate like that, so maybe the party would be better off nominating someone with a moderate proposal that's more likely to win the public's support. Either way, the debate matters.

--Matthew Yglesias

NICE TRY. New York Post columnist John Podhoretz apparently had the same column idea as Jonah Goldberg -- nasty liberal media elites make fun of Rush Limbaugh for being a drug addict. I'll just point out how unsuccessful Podhoretz was at finding good examples of left-of-center schadenfreude. His only two examples of liberal "glee," as he calls it, are both rather limp. Here's the first:

CNN's Aaron Brown, who always looks as though he is presiding over a funeral, spoke Friday night about "the permanent smirk that seems to be attached to my face" owing to Limbaugh's troubles.

Sounds to me like Brown feels a little self-conscious about that smirk. It's hardly an expression of glee. And if all Limbaugh, who has demonized drug addicts for years on his show, gets from Brown is a smirk, he's getting off easy. For heaven's sake, the man's a flaming hypocrite. Limbaugh's allies should be praising Brown for his restraint. Podhoretz's next target:

Newsweek's Jonathan Alter referred to Limbaugh as a "bully-boy conservative" and said "the big guy himself could help the dialogue if he returns to the airwaves after rehab with a more tolerant and less vitriolic message. But then he wouldn't be Rush Limbaugh anymore."

Of course, what Alter means by "more tolerant and less vitriolic" is . . . more left-wing.

Perhaps Podhoretz has mind-reading abilities of which I am unaware, but maybe when Alter says "more tolerant and less vitriolic" he means . . . more tolerant and less vitriolic. Does Podhoretz think it's impossible to be both conservative and tolerant? Well, he is working from the inside.

The point is, Podhoretz couldn't find a good example of a mainstream or liberal pundit who expressed glee over Limbaugh's addiction. (Pointing out that Rush is a hypocrite on drug policy, or wondering how he would react if Bill Clinton were revealed to be a drug addict, or asking whether having experienced the reality of drug addiction will change Limbaugh's views on how we treat non-violent drug offenders -- none of these count, because all are eminently fair questions.) And if you take a look around, most of the right's usual targets have declined to take the bait. Joe Conason (here) and Robert Scheer (here), two guys who are not known for their reluctance to stick in the blade, explicitly offer Limbaugh sympathy for his addiction (if not for his past remarks on addicts). Paul Krugman is, as yet, nowhere to be seen on the Rush front.

This is a good example of why it's usually safer to let your reporting drive your column idea rather than vice versa.

--Nick Confessore

BUSH VS. BUSH. As the administration tries to convince the American people that the problems in Iraq are all a figment of the liberal media's exaggeration, the fact remains that the president's $87 billion request is running into trouble on Capitol Hill. If you look at the latest Gallup poll it's easy to understand why. While Operation Blame The Media has helped boost Bush's personal approval rating to 56-40, his budget request is now favored by only 41 percent of the public, with 57 percent against.

This is probably no coincidence. After all, people don't normally think that the government should spend tens of billions of dollars on solving a problem that doesn't exist. Of course, if people get too pessimistic about Iraq they won't want to throw good money after bad either, but unless Bush brings home the fact that the situation remains precarious, I don't see how he can expect people to support forgoing expenditures at home in favor of aid to a foreign country. In a sense, the political people in the White House are working at cross-purposes with the policy people. Traditionally, politics has always won out in this administration, but hopefully the political operatives will see that it's in the president's -- and country's -- long-term interests to get the job in Iraq done right.

--Matthew Yglesias

HIGH-TECH BALLOT STUFFING. The Independent newspaper has one of the best reports I've seen on the issue of electronic-voting-machine tampering. Andrew Gumbel's article is comprehensive and explains the technological issues pretty well. It's also quite chilling. Examining some unusual election results in Georgia during the 2002 races, Gumbel writes:

In many Georgia counties last November, the machines froze up, causing long delays as technicians tried to reboot them. In heavily Democratic Fulton County, in downtown Atlanta, 67 memory cards from the voting machines went missing, delaying certification of the results there for 10 days. In neighbouring DeKalb County, 10 memory cards were unaccounted for; they were later recovered from terminals that had supposedly broken down and been taken out of service.

It is still unclear exactly how results from these missing cards were tabulated, or if they were counted at all. And we will probably never know, for a highly disturbing reason. The vote count was not conducted by state elections officials, but by the private company that sold Georgia the voting machines in the first place, under a strict trade-secrecy contract that made it not only difficult but actually illegal - on pain of stiff criminal penalties - for the state to touch the equipment or examine the proprietary software to ensure the machines worked properly. There was not even a paper trail to follow up. The machines were fitted with thermal printing devices that could theoretically provide a written record of voters' choices, but these were not activated. Consequently, recounts were impossible. Had Diebold Inc, the manufacturer, been asked to review the votes, all it could have done was programme the computers to spit out the same data as before, flawed or not.

Astonishingly, these are the terms under which America's top three computer voting machine manufacturers -- Diebold, Sequoia and Election Systems and Software (ES&S) -- have sold their products to election officials around the country. Far from questioning the need for rigid trade secrecy and the absence of a paper record, secretaries of state and their technical advisers - anxious to banish memories of the hanging chad fiasco and other associated disasters in the 2000 presidential recount in Florida -- have, for the most part, welcomed the touchscreen voting machines as a technological miracle solution.

Georgia was not the only state last November to see big last-minute swings in voting patterns. There were others in Colorado, Minnesota, Illinois and New Hampshire - all in races that had been flagged as key partisan battlegrounds, and all won by the Republican Party. Again, this was widely attributed to the campaigning efforts of President Bush and the demoralisation of a Democratic Party too timid to speak out against the looming war in Iraq.

Strangely, however, the pollsters made no comparable howlers in lower-key races whose outcome was not seriously contested. Another anomaly, perhaps. What, then, is one to make of the fact that the owners of the three major computer voting machines are all prominent Republican Party donors? Or of a recent political fund-raising letter written to Ohio Republicans by Walden O'Dell, Diebold's chief executive, in which he said he was "committed to helping Ohio to deliver its electoral votes to the president next year" -- even as his company was bidding for the contract on the state's new voting machinery?

Though the article talks a lot about Georgia, it also points to some anomalies in Alabama's gubernatorial election, where the Democratic incumbent, Don Siegelman, was initally declared the winner before victory was awarded to Republican challenger Bob Riley. I think this should be a concern for Republicans as well as Democrats -- in a country as evenly divided as the United States, widespread vote-tampering will hurt both sides.

What's the solution? Go back to printed ballots, which, unlike voting machines, provide a reliable record that can be reexamined when necessary. But not just any ballots. This article in Slate argues that the biggest problem with paper ballots isn't that they're paper, but that they're so poorly designed -- usually by bureaucrats and via regulation:

[C]ounty officials oversee their production, and the ballots are put together according to each state's election code. California's code, like many of the other states', is a lengthy document that reads like a bureaucrat's version of the Ten Commandments: "The Secretary of State shall conduct a drawing of the letters of the alphabet, the result of which shall be known as a randomized alphabet. … There shall be four drawings, three in each even-numbered year and one in each odd-numbered year." You half-expect mention of a plague.

This is not a knock on election officials or regulations. It's just that if you want a ballot that's easy to read, it needs to be designed by someone who knows how to achieve clarity with a visual product.

Read the rest of Jessie Scanlon's article to learn about the numerous ways in which California's ballot, for one, violates basic principles of graphic design.

--Nick Confessore

WHY STOP NOW? I'm not Joe Lieberman's biggest fan, but looking at his travails in the current presidential campaign, I can't help but feel sorry for him sometimes. He goes ahead and proposes a tax cut for middle class families to be paid for by a tax hike on very rich families and The Washington Post gives him "Lieberman Proposes Tax Hikes on The Wealthy" as a headline. Why not "Liberman Proposes Middle Class Tax Relief"? After all, there are far more people (married couples earning between $14,000 and $114,650) who would see their taxes go down under Lieberman's plan than there are people who would see them go up. If I recall correctly, Bush's tax cut proposals weren't greeted with headlines like "Bush Unveils Bold Deficit Increase Plan." And check out the GOP reaction:

"Call your blueprint what you will, Senator Lieberman, but Americans understand that a tax increase is a tax increase is a tax increase," [Republican National Committee chairman Ed] Gillespie said. "Raising taxes won't create jobs. In fact, it will make job creation harder."

If raising taxes is always wrong, no matter what the money's being spent on, even if the purpose is to raise funds for cutting other taxes, and if the deficit is never a concern, then why shouldn't we just eliminate taxes outright and finance the government entirely through borrowing from future generations? Taking a look at the latest tax-cut binge, a series of lobbyist-driven corporate giveaways being ginned up under the pretense of eliminating a WTO-banned export subsidy, I suppose that's the direction we're headed in, so why not just come out and say it?

--Matthew Yglesias

LOTT OF TROUBLE. If you haven't seen it yet, you'll want to check out Prospect contributing writer Chris Mooney's devastating article about gun scholar -- we must now use that term warily -- John Lott, currently at the American Enterprise Institute. A number of academics, along with an even larger number of bloggers, have called into question Lott's empirical data; Mooney's article, published by the good people at Mother Jones, is the first piece in a mainstream magazine to put everything in one place and in context.

What struck me most was this passage, describing Lott's efforts to avoid conceding errors on some key pieces of data. It's a little complicated, but reading it all the way through will definitely cause you to wonder about Lott's basic honesty and integrity:

The Stanford Law Review critique, authored by Yale's [Ian] Ayres and Stanford's [John] Donohue, analyzed more recent crime statistics, extending Lott's original 1977-1992 crime dataset to include data through the late 1990s. As it turned out, after 1992, partly due to the end of the 1980s' crack cocaine-related crime wave, crime rates dropped dramatically in states with large urban centers, many of which had not passed right to carry laws. This fact proves highly inconvenient to the "More Guns, Less Crime" argument. After testing Lott and [co-author] Mustard's analysis with more years of data and different econometric tweakings, Donohue and Ayres conclude, "No longer can any plausible case be made on statistical grounds that shall-issue laws are likely to reduce crime for all or even most states"; their analysis even suggested such laws might increase violent crime.

This may seem like an ordinary scholarly dispute, but it quickly devolved into the sort of controversy that has followed much of Lott's recent work. Lott was invited to write a response to Ayres and Donohue, scheduled to run simultaneously in the Stanford Law Review. He accepted the invitation, but then suddenly withdrew his name from the response as the editorial process wound down. The cause, according to then Stanford Law Review president Benjamin Horwich, was a minor editing dispute involving literally one word; Lott, however, complains of an editorial "ultimatum" from the journal.

And so Lott's response was published under the name of two co-authors, economists Florenz Plassmann and John Whitley. They accused Donohue and Ayres of having "simply misread their own results" and, in a feat of statistical one-upmanship, claimed to extend the crime data even further -- through 2000 -- thereby rescuing the "More Guns, Less Crime" hypothesis in the process. But when Ayres and Donohue analyzed this new data, they say they found severe coding errors that, when corrected, thoroughly obliterated the attempt to confirm the "More Guns, Less Crime" thesis. Similar coding errors, wrote Donohue and Ayres, have cropped up elsewhere in Lott's work, including in his new book, "The Bias Against Guns".

A charge of coding errors, while not unheard of, is embarrassing, since it implies that only by using mistaken data can Lott preserve his thesis. The errors might have been accidental, but since the Stanford Law Review exchange, Lott has continued to defend the erroneous work. "There's a bit of concern over making the error, but now there's huge concern over not backing away from the results now that it has been pointed out," says Ayres.

In May, Lott told the Chronicle of Higher Education that the claim of coding errors had not been reviewed by a third party. Now, though, he admits the errors but calls them "minor" and claims they don't appreciably affect the results of the Plassmann-Whitley paper (which is, of course, really his own). "I knew he was going to say that," says Donohue when informed of Lott's response.

To get to the bottom of the dispute -- which goes to the heart of the continuing validity of "More Guns, Less Crime" -- Donohue and Ayres responded to Plassmann-Whitley by contrasting two key tables, one that uses their (read: Lott's) data and one that corrects the coding errors. The first table, using miscoded data, shows statistically significant decreases in murders, rape, and robbery. The second, using corrected data, shows statistically insignificant decreases in murder, rape, and robbery, along with statistically significant rises in property crimes, auto theft, and larceny, which Plassmann and Whitely had also noted in their paper.

In the face of this evidence, how can Lott continue to claim the coding errors don't matter? In an interview conducted on August 18 (transcript), Lott told me that he had posted "corrected" tables on his website for all to see. But when I downloaded Lott's "corrected" version of the contested table, it showed the same numerical values as that of Donohue and Ayres -- that is, the coding errors were gone -- but bizarrely claimed the properly coded data still indicated statistically significant drops in murder, rape, and robbery. That's because Lott had introduced a new twist: Rather than simply fixing the incorrectly coded data, he omitted a key calculation regarding statistical significance used in the Plassmann-Whitley paper. (For statistics geeks, it's called "clustering at the state level.") Faced with no other way to save his thesis, you could say that Lott changed the rules -- rules his own team had laid down -- in the middle of the game.

Confronted with this, Lott's subsequent actions raise even more questions. On the website, Lott claimed the "corrected" table used "clustering," when it did not. In a heated interview on August 19 (transcript), Lott said this labeling claim must be an error. But the very next day, he e-mailed a file containing precisely the same table, claiming that all the tables on his website were "clearly and properly labeled."

On September 2, Lott changed his story yet again, emailing me that "the file should now be returned to what had been up there before." But when I downloaded the new file, the key table had been altered to remove the questionable clustering assertion, but had inexplicably reverted to the incorrectly coded Plassmann-Whitley findings that Donohue and Ayres had long since debunked, and Lott himself had admitted to me were incorrectly coded. And despite all these changes, as of October 13, Lott's website still labels the table as last being corrected "April 18, 2003."

This stuff can be very technical and hard to follow -- one reason, it seems, why Lott has gotten away with it for so long. Kudos to Mooney for explaining everything so accessibly (and to Mother Jones for recognizing what an important story this is).

If you're not convinced, and have some time on your hands, read the transcripts of Mooney's interviews with Lott (here) and (here). They do not reflect well on Lott. Mooney discusses the transcripts and article here, on his own blog.

Mooney also reports that the National Academy of Sciences will be reviewing Lott's work for a report due this fall. If the NAS finds Lott guilty of shoddy scholarship, AEI will be faced with an interesting test of its own institutional integrity.

--Nick Confessore

PUT UP YER DUKES. Can we all now agree that Bill O'Reilly is the most thin-skinned, hypocritical man on television -- the perfect example of a guy who can dish it out (at least when he controls the mute button) but can't take it? Here's a Philadelphia Inquirer story in which O'Reilly explains why he felt compelled to stomp out in the middle of his Fresh Air interview last week:

"I put myself through the ordeal to get definitive proof of what NPR is," said the conservative-leaning populist. "I don't have any problem with NPR or Terry Gross. I do have a problem with [tax dollars] paying for propaganda.

"Ordeal"? No offense to NPR, but cutting short an interview with Terry Gross is like backing down from a fistfight with Urkel. The article continues:

"The far left has a jihad against Fox News Channel, and I'm pretty much the standard-bearer," O'Reilly said. "They don't like the fact that I'm powerful and that I speak my mind."

Well, if by "speak my mind," O'Reilly means "run away like a sissy when the questions get tough," then yes, he does speak his mind. Maybe it's time for O'Reilly to retire the tough-guy act.

--Nick Confessore

OVER OUR HEADS. The Washington Post's estimable Dana Milbank reports on the Bush administration's strategy for dealing with criticism of our occupation of Iraq:

The Bush administration, displeased with the news coverage of the war in Iraq, has accelerated efforts to bypass the national media by telling the administration's story directly to the American public.

Yesterday, Bush granted exclusive interviews to five regional broadcasting companies -- an unprecedented effort to reach news organizations that do not regularly cover the White House.

The effort by Bush to reach out to about 10 million Americans through the regional broadcasters -- Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and Iraq administrator L. Paul Bremer had similar sessions previously -- came two days after it emerged that soldiers in Iraq have sent form letters home to local newspapers asserting that the U.S. troops had been welcomed "with open arms" in Iraq.

Identical letters to the editor from different soldiers with the 2nd Battalion of the 503rd Infantry Regiment appeared in 11 newspapers across the country, Gannett News Service reported on Saturday. The news service reached six soldiers who said they agreed with the letter but had not written it, one who had not signed the letter, and one who didn't even know about the letter.

Lt. Col. Cindy Scott-Johnson, a Pentagon spokeswoman, said that the form letter was similar to the "hometown news release program" and that the Pentagon had raised no objection "that I know of" to the letter, apparently written by 2nd Battalion staff and distributed to soldiers.

The form letter from the troops, like the Bush interviews with local media outlets, stems from a frustration with the national media and a desire to circumvent what the administration views as unfairly negative coverage of the Iraq conflict.

Here's a good Los Angeles Times article on the Army letters, which appear to have been the work of an overzealous battalion public affairs officer. For what it's worth, I don't think the letters and the White House bypass of the national media were coordinated -- the Army, for all its friction with the Secretary of Defense, is very sensitive when it feels events on the ground are being reported in a way that seems to reflect badly on its troops; and the Bush administration, dominated by conservatives, firmly believes that the national media are its enemy. Both have their own reasons for what columnist Jim Pinkerton describes, in a very good column, as "manufacturing news of victories and triumphs" a la 1984's Ministry of Truth. But I'll note that this isn't the first time Bush has used such tactics: During the 2000 campaign, Karen Hughes likewise made a practice of granting reporters and key regional and even local papers face-to-face interviews with Bush; the resulting articles tended to be very uncritical and, thanks to the access granted, usually front page-news. National reporters were stiff-armed and herded along, which most accepted, thus inspiring the Bush folks to continue the practice long after they were in office.

The thing is . . . it worked. Al Gore perpetually tried to please the national media and satiate their demand for new information and responses to charges lobbed by the other side; as a result, his campaign was overly reactive, and his message discipline suffered. Bush largely ignored the national press, brushing off demands for more detailed policy proposals and explanations for apparent inconsistencies. And while it's not really in my interest as a journalist to say so, I think the Democrats running for the White House would be smart to do the same (especially Wesley Clark, who, in trying to make campaign reporters correctly describe his position on the war, gave the appearance of wobbling).

Nevertheless, there's an excellent point made in the Milbank piece, although it comes all the way at the end, about the media:

Martha Kumar, a Towson University professor who has studied White House relations with the media, said reaching out to regional media "can give you a temporary lift." But, she added, "I don't know in the long run what it really buys you. The president's problems now are policy problems, not communications problems."

This is precisely the problem -- a consequence of conservatives' overreliance on the intellectual crutch of "media bias." Like congressional Democrats who believe their main problem is "getting their message out" (rather than lack of a coherent and inspiring vision) the Bush administration seems to believe that everything's fine on the inside -- it just needs to overcome the liberal media. Everything is not fine on the inside. Bush's problems in Iraq do indeed stem from ill-advised policies and obstinance. And as Ron Suskind made clear in his Esquire article of last year, this administration is spectacularly ill-equipped to solve them.

--Nick Confessore

CLARK JUMPS ON SERVICE. Wesley Clark looks ready to tackle national service, according to CNN:

Today, Clark will announce his plan to establish a "Civilian Reserve," comprising everyday Americans using their "unique skills" to tackle an assortment of community-based problems -- from specific tasks like repairing a crumbling school or a neighbor's tornado-ravaged home to broad, less tangible goals such as "securing the homeland."

The Civilian Reserve would work with -- but not replace -- the nation's armed forces in dealing with any number of local emergencies. The campaign did not release any more details on today's proposal, except to say that it would use technology to help identify and mobilize people so that their skills are applied most effectively.

This community-service component of the general's platform was honed in large part by Clark's campaign chairman Eli Segal, who in a past life founded and headed President Clinton's AmeriCorps.

We'll have to wait and see how this pans out, but it strikes me as good policy and good politics. It's good policy in the sense that encouraging more service, and finding ways to channel it in productive directions, is the kind of thing we need more of. It's good politics for several reasons. One is that national service is the kind of "high-centrist" stuff that pundits love to praise. Two is that it's the kind of thing you don't want to really be against, and making himself a champion of national service -- which fits nicely with his biography and message -- gives Clark a chance to whack President Bush for one of this administration's more notorious failed promises. You'll remember that back during his widely praised State of the Union speech in 2002, Bush promised to boost AmeriCorps by 50 percent. Instead, as the Democratic Leadership Council's Will Marshall and Marc Magee pointed out in this Christian Science Monitor op-ed, Bush installed incompetent leadership, who mismanaged the outfit to the point where House Republicans could claim AmericCorps was too troubled to deserve increased funding. Here's how it went down, according to Marshall and Magee:

First, under pressure to reduce costs in their first budget, the Bush administration did not ask Congress for any money to replenish the AmeriCorps trust fund, which pays education awards to volunteers.

Second, after the president publicly pledged to increase the number of AmeriCorps members by 50 percent, Bush's political appointees compounded the problem by accelerating the pace of recruitment to meet his goal a year ahead of schedule.

In November 2002, the CNCS ran out of money and was forced to declare a recruiting freeze. With the White House silent on how to fix the problem, congressional Republicans papered over the emerging deficit by shifting funds from AmeriCorps's grants program to its trust fund. The result was a 30 percent cut in AmeriCorps' operating budget.

It would be ironic if President Bush's promise to expand AmeriCorps was undone by the missteps and mismanagement of his own administration. But if he fails to speak out for emergency funds when Congress returns this fall, he will have no one to blame but himself.

Bush is vulnerable on this issue, and Clark is smart to take it on.

--Nick Confessore

AH, CIVILITY. It seems like only yesterday that conservatives were lecturing us on the importance of civil discourse and lamenting the fact that Bush-hatred has gotten out of control. Now, however, Rich Lowry has a new book out and civility is nowhere in sight:

At least that would be Bill and Hillary's advice. In LEGACY: PAYING THE PRICE FOR THE CLINTON YEARS, I take a scalpel (and occasionally a sledgehammer) to their claims of political and policy mastery in the 1990s, on everything from the economy, to welfare reform, to crime, to health care. I defend Ken Starr and impeachment, and excoriate the Clinton foreign-policy record, which makes Neville Chamberlain look clear-eyed and strong willed in comparison. Sidney Blumenthal and Hillary Clinton have piled massive amounts of manure around the Clinton record. Legacy is your way of digging out. (End of sales pitch.)

Maybe Lowry can explain how that manure metaphor is supposed to work. The Clinton record was good, but Blumenthal and Hillary made it look bad by covering it in manure and Lowry's going to help us see the light? How is a sledgehammer (or a scalpel) supposed to help me dig? Either way our long national nightmare of peace and prosperity is finally over, and we have George W. Bush to thank for it.

--Matthew Yglesias

NO LUNCH FOR YOU. While this week is probably better known for containing Columbus Day, I would be remiss if I failed to note that this is also Marriage Protection Week, as duly proclaimed by the President of the United States. It's tempting to simply poke fun, but it's actually pretty impressive how the president managed to squeeze a little signal to the social right ("Marriage is a union between a man and a woman") and a plug for tax cuts ("My tax relief package eliminated the marriage penalty") into such a brief statement.

Nevertheless, it will be a real shame if Americans are so busy taking the "opportunity to focus our efforts on preserving the sanctity of marriage" that we forget that this is also National School Lunch Week. In this regard it's worth noting that the Bush administration's main achievement on the school lunch front has been to make it harder for poor kids to get food. Just one more small example of the compassion agenda in action.

--Matthew Yglesias

COLUMBUS DAY. TAP Online and Tapped will not publish on Monday, Oct. 13. We will return on Tuesday, Oct. 14.

AROUND THE BLOGS. Allen Brill responds to George Lakoff's recent Prospect cover story here. Kevin Drum has a good series of posts (here and here) elucidating just how radical the modern GOP, and in particular the Texas elements that make up its vanguard, has become. Jesse at Pandagon patiently explains to Charles Johnson why the Dean campaign's practice of hiring bloggers is not, in fact, a "pyramid scheme." Nathan Newman explains how unions create Democrats (which will come as no surprise to the right). And Chris Mooney continues his excellent series of posts on the uses of congressional technology assessment here.

--Nick Confessore

A LITTLE BRAGGING. Yesterday, TAP Online learned that it had received its first-ever nomination for an Online Journalism Award. The honoree is our longtime culture columnist Noy Thrupkaew, who is a finalist for the award in the commentary division. The winner will be announced on Nov. 15 at the Online New Association's annual conference, but just by becoming a finalist, Noy has joined some pretty impressive journalistic company. Here are the five columns that earned Noy the nomination. All of us here at the Prospect couldn't be happier for her.

--Richard Just

CIVILITY IN POLITICS. In this column, Paul Krugman wonders, er, who is David Brooks kidding?

[A]ngry liberals can take some lessons in civility from today's right.

Consider, for example, Fox News's genteel response to Christiane Amanpour, the CNN correspondent. Ms. Amanpour recently expressed some regret over CNN's prewar reporting: "Perhaps, to a certain extent, my station was intimidated by the administration and its foot soldiers at Fox News." A Fox spokeswoman replied, "It's better to be viewed as a foot soldier for Bush than as a spokeswoman for Al Qaeda."

And liberal pundits who may be tempted to cast personal aspersions can take lessons in courtesy from conservatives like Charles Krauthammer, who last December reminded TV viewers of his previous career as a psychiatrist, then said of Al Gore, "He could use a little help."

What's really important, of course, is that political figures stick to the issues, like the Bush adviser who told The New York Times that the problem with Senator John Kerry is that "he looks French."

Some say that the right, having engaged in name-calling and smear tactics when Bill Clinton was president, now wants to change the rules so such behavior is no longer allowed. In fact, the right is still calling names and smearing; it wants to prohibit rude behavior only by liberals.

But there's more going on than a simple attempt to impose a double standard. All this fuss about the rudeness of the Bush administration's critics is an attempt to preclude serious discussion of that administration's policies. For there is no way to be both honest and polite about what has happened in these past three years.

There's a lamentable tendency on both sides of the aisle to psychologize the opposition; I've probably been guilty of it myself on occasion. (On the other hand, I think it's only among Republicans that this has become a kind of standard operating procedure when attacking presidential candidates, all of whom -- except for Bush -- are apparently pathological liars.) But there's simply no equivalent on the left for the kind of bile spewing daily out of allegedly responsible conservative television and radio shows. I can't think of a time when, say, Jim Hightower compared President Bush to the devil or made fun of his daughters for being ugly. We could all stand to be a little more civil. But it's certainly a little rich to get such lectures from conservatives, even genteel ones like Brooks.

--Nick Confessore

REHABILITATING RUSH. It's tempting to take advantage of the news that Rush Limbaugh will be entering rehab to obtain treatment for his OxyContin addiction to kick a man I dislike while he's down. Honestly, though, Rush deserves our sympathy and I hope he's able to kick the habit. Still, it's worth noting that many Americans are not lucky enough to have the opportunity of dealing with their drug problems in this way. Instead of treatment, tens of thousands of people -- mostly poor people and minorities -- are thrown in jail thanks to their drug addictions.

I take it that as Rush was discussing this situation with friends, family and colleagues no one ever suggested that he ought to check himself into his local prison because, as everyone knows, the best way to deal with this problem is to get treatment, not do hard time. Maybe someday the criminal justice system will recognize what's obvious to everyone else. Atrios also notes some hypocrisy from Rush on this score, so let's hope he comes out of this with a changed perspective.

--Matthew Yglesias

RIGHT-WING RELATIVISM. Two Tim Graham posts on The Corner today making allegations of media bias illustrate the growing embrace of absurd relativism in conservative circles. First regarding last night's Frontline documentary:

Alessandra Stanley of the Times grasped the point: PBS "does not provide new information so much as it richly illustrates the case against the Bush administration -- a prosecution brief enhanced with charts, photographs, and a thick leather binder." In short, the taxpayer dollars of the Bush half of the electorate are being transferred to make the campaign arguments of the Gore half.

Well, are the facts being presented true? If they are, then what exactly is PBS supposed to do, throw in some false pro-Bush claims in order to make the report more balanced? When the press reports on an issue, it ought to be searching for the truth in an unbiased manner; if the truth is inconvenient for one side or another in a political debate, the press can't be held responsible for the fact that one side of the debate consists of liars. Then over here (you've got to scroll down a bit) Graham's upset about something he saw on the Today show:

Lester Holt to William Donohue this morning on Today: "Promiscuity happens around the world, so who's putting more people in danger right now: the Catholic Church's advice not to use condoms that they don't protect, or the World Health Organization that says use them, they're at least 90 percent effective?"

But look, condoms are 90 percent effective. The World Health Organization is right, the Catholic Church is wrong, and the Vatican is putting more people in danger right now. The media already seem to take the Graham-approved relativist approach when it comes to economic questions -- "Person A says so and so, but person B says he's wrong," without any effort to figure out who's right -- and it's created a large and systemic bias in the press in favor people advancing bogus economic policies.

Extending the "he said, she said" model, fetishizing balance above accuracy, would do incredible damage to the public's understanding of other issues. If conservatives don't want to get called out by the press for saying things that aren't true, they should stop saying things that aren't true.

--Matthew Yglesias

GREENS GET REAL. One of the un-noted anomalies of the recall is that third-party and independent candidates got unprecedented publicity and legitimacy, and then bombed at the polls. Arianna Huffington and Green Party candidate Peter Camejo (whom Prospect readers of a certain vintage might recall as the Socialist Workers Party presidential candidate of 1976) participated in all the major debates. Camejo, in particular, performed admirably, occasionally straying into arcana, but for the most part highlighting the state's underinvestment in the public sector and the less than progressive nature of most state tax systems.

A Green Party dream, right? Not exactly. In November of last year, when Camejo couldn't get on camera to save his life, he won 5 percent of the vote. In the recall, he won 3 percent. Where did his vote go? In the Los Angeles Times exit poll, a plurality of the voters who said they'd voted for Camejo last year -- 44 percent -- owned up to backing Democratic Lieutenant Governor Cruz Bustamante when they cast their votes this time out.

The reasons for this defection from within the ranks aren't hard to discern. Last November, Gray Davis was expected to dispatch Republican Bill Simon handily, and Greens and other lefties felt free to go with Camejo. This time out, the specter of Arnold loomed over the state, and so Greens joined most other liberals in voting against the recall and for the hapless Bustamante. Camejo himself almost encouraged this deviation, saying on numerous occasions along the campaign trail that he understood if his supporters felt compelled to vote for Bustamante.

Dare we say it? That after three years of the Bush presidency, a wave of principled pragmatism is detectable among the Greens? That Naderian identity politics is no longer the dominant strain? We can only hope.

--Harold Meyerson

CUBA CONUNDRUM. For both parties, there are electorally pivotal groups that must be pandered to no matter how bad the resulting policy is. For Democrats, I think, the worst pandering takes place in Iowa, over ethanol subsidies, which at this point has reached the level of an inside joke -- Democratic presidential candidates know the subsidies are bad policy, Iowans know they have the candidates by the short hairs, and everyone just plays along with a wink and a nod.

For Republicans, or at least those hoping to be re-elected to the White House, the group in question is Cuban-Americans, whose support and turnout is pivotal to GOP success in Florida. The embargo is a stupid policy. It has done nothing to put pressure on Fidel Castro to allow democratization. It is opposed by many right-thinking conservative intellectuals and almost the entire business community. It is absurdly hypocritical. (What, no China embargo?) Yet the embargo lives on because a well-funded lobby of diehard Cuban exiles in South Florida wants it to. And this morning, apparently after being shaken down by same, President Bush has announced that he is going to try to stiffen the embargo. Some of the stuff covered in The Associated Press article is hard to quibble with, like cracking down on trafficking in women (although that's hardly a problem confined to Cuba). But parts of the president's speech that I watched on television this morning -- a transcript isn't yet available -- discussed ordering homeland security chief Tom Ridge to start putting more effort into cracking down on people who misuse the Cuba travel waivers to conduct business or pleasure trips or to bring hard currency into the country. And while we should certainly be enforcing our laws, it's hard to justify making this one of Ridge's priorities. Shouldn't we keep the guy focused on, you know, keeping terrorists out of the country?

--Nick Confessore

NADER IDENTITY POLITICS. Just in case you harbored the slightest notion that Ralph Nader thinks that the splinter candidate route can ever be wrong, think again. It may have gotten lost in the lead up to the California recall, but on Oct. 1, Nader wrote an op-ed article in the Los Angeles Times excoriating Arianna Huffington for dropping out of the race. And Nader was only warming up: He also cast a cold eye on such Republicans as Darrell Issa and Peter Ueberroth for deferring to Arnold Schwarzenegger, and then blasted Republican conservatives for selling out their principles by not sticking with Tom McClintock.

"It's not because Schwarzenegger is vanquishing McClintock on the merits," Nader lamented. Candidates were dropping and longtime ideologues were trimming their sails, Nader wrote, all offering the same excuse: "The polls made me do it."

"Did they drop out because their opponents shared their views?" Nader asked -- answering his own question with a simple, "No."

In fact, the above-named candidates dropped for a range of reasons, but each of them did believe that the candidate they meant to help -- Schwarzenegger or Gray Davis, depending -- was in fact closer to their views than his main opponent. And that aggregating votes for the candidate to whom they were closer was, in fact, a proper political choice in a winner-take-all electoral system.

Politics is like horseshoes: Closeness does count. But not, apparently, for Nader, who gives a new meaning to identity politics: If you're not identical to me, I'll run against you.

--Harold Meyerson

JOURNALISTS AND ABUSE OF POWER. After praising a terrible Mark Steyn article (debunked by Ted Barlow here), David Frum really gets down to business, mocking the press for caring about abuses of power:

The Wilson story excites journalists because it accuses the Bush administration of abusing its powers for political advantage -- and there is nothing that journalists enjoy more than abuse-of-power stories, at least during Republican administrations. The Wilson story ratifies journalists’ prejudices, and so journalists revel in it.

The notion that the press somehow ignored allegations against Bill Clinton is so absurd that one hardly knows what to say (I seem to recall having heard something about someone named "Monica"), so I'll ignore it. Frum came to journalism after being forced out of the White House (ironically enough, for leaking) so maybe he really doesn't understand why journalists think this kind of thing is important. Normally, when a crime is committed the public has reason to believe that the police (or, as appropriate, the FBI) will apprehend the perpetrator. That, after all, is their job and they're trained to do it. But when a crime is committed by a high-level government official, we have reason to believe that the official (or the official's boss) will impede the investigation in order to avoid public embarrassment.

The solution to this kind of thing is democracy -- either public pressure will build on the politician to act, or else the public will throw the bum out. This, however, only works if the public is aware of what's going on. That, in turn, will only happen if the public is made aware of what's going on and that only happens if journalists bring things to the public's attention. The Plame affair is a case in point. The Bush administration seemed to have zero interest in pursuing the investigation until the story suddently reappeared on the front page of The Washington Post.

--Matthew Yglesias

NATURAL DISASTER. It now appears that Republican squabbling may postpone the energy bill until early next year. At TAP Online, Prospect contributing editor Merrill Goozner explains why it would be better if it were postponed forever.

--Richard Just

KINSLEY ON CLARK. Slate's Michael Kinsley is normally one of the sharpest writers out there, but his powers seem to have failed him in this bit of Clark-bashing. After going on for a while about Colin Powell, he comes to the point:

Then there is Gen. Wesley Clark. Much of his support comes from people who think they haven't swooned themselves but believe that others will do so. But most of these people are in a swoon whether they realize it or not. They think that Clark has the best chance of defeating George Bush, and that nothing else matters. Their assessment is based on what seems to me a simple-minded view that you can place all the candidates on a political spectrum, then pick the one who's as far toward the other side as your side can bear, and call it pragmatism.

How pragmatic is it, though, to snub the one candidate who seems to be able to get people's juices flowing--that would be Howard Dean--in favor of one with nothing interesting to say, on the theory that this, plus the uniform stashed in the back of his closet, will make him appealing to people you disagree with? When the odds are against you, as they are for the Democrats in 2004, caution and calculation can be the opposite of pragmatism.

For one thing, Kinsley seems to be contradicting himself here. Either Dean is "the one candidate who seems to be able to get people's juices flowing" or else people are "in a swoon" over Clark. It can't be both unless there's some subtle swoon/juice distinction I'm missing out on. More fundamentally, though, Kinsley doesn't seem to have considered the possibility that some of us are attracted to Clark not just because we think he'd be a good candidate, but because we think he'd be a good president.

Clearly, in an election where national security is going to play an important role, a few stars on your shoulder isn't going to hurt. But the reason national security is going to be important in 2004 is that right now national security is important, and the reason high-ranking generals have a lot of foreign-policy credibility is that high-ranking generals know a lot about foreign policy. In particular, people like me who liked the liberal interventionism of the later Clinton years and now find themselves sympathetic to the ostensible goals of the Bush foreign policy but are disgusted by the gross dishonesty, shallow opportunism, rank hypocrisy, utter recklessness and general incompetence with which it's been carried out have good reason to think that Clark could be the best man to guide America on the international scene.

Kinsley goes on to raise perfectly legitimate questions about Clark's next-to-nonexistent domestic policy agenda. Certainly I'm not going to make up my mind until I hear more from Clark about this, but the primaries are still a long way off, so why not see what happens and stay open to the possibility that a military candidate is more than just a gimmick?

--Matthew Yglesias

TRAIL MIX: WORDS TO LIVE BY FROM CHRIS LEHANE. Daily Kos and Political Wire have got folks all in a tizzy about whether or not Democratic Party consultant Chris Lehane will be joining his wife Andrea Evans and his partner Mark Fabiani in the Clark campaign. I caught up with Lehane by cell phone while he was tooling around Little Rock with his wife looking at apartments.

Is he an adviser to Clark?

"Not in any formal fashion. I, in my capacity as a loving and adoring spouse, attempt to serve as an adviser to my wife, but I doubt I'll have any success at telling her what to do."

Will he become an adviser to Clark?

"I haven't made any final determinations about what I am going to do in 2004."

What does he think about the way he's become a figure of speculation and concern among Democratic activists?

"If I spent my time worrying about what other people thought about me I'd have very little time to do other things. One of the things you learn in politics is to have thick skin."

What about his reputation for playing serious hard-ball politics?

"Anyone who has worked with me or spent time with me knows that I am a passionate advocate and fighter for Democratic principles and beliefs and I will do anything I can to help take George W. Bush out of Washington and the White House. . . . Democrats seem to think that just because you have the right position, you're automatically going to win. We as Democrats need to be prepared to fight hard to win."

Does that include fighting other Democratic candidates?

"That means fighting very hard for the people you're working on behalf of and advocating for their positions."

You've become the story for a lot of people.

"I can tell you from experience that all campaigns take on the character and personality of the candidate. The consultants, the staff, the volunteers -- all reflect the spirit and personality of the candidate."

Words to live by.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

K STREET JUDGES. There's an interesting article in The Hill about the changing face of judicial confirmation battles. Traditionally, these fights have been of concern to social conservatives, but the corporate types who pay the bills have kept their distance. Now, though, business groups are pouring money into organizations like the Committee for Justice (whose head, C. Boyden Gray is the subject of an unflattering profile by Franklin Foer in the current New Republic), which are dedicated to putting Bush's right-wing nominees on the bench.

The article portrays the change as largely the result of corporate executives deciding that the judiciary is more important than they'd previously realized, but I wouldn't be surprised to learn that simple strong-arming by the GOP is playing an imporant role here, too. The key fact is that the persuader-in-chief on this topic seems to be Rick Santorum, who, according to this article, appears to have a talent for muscling coporate lobbyists.

--Matthew Yglesias

NOT ALL OF US ARE WHITE. In the midst of the ruckus over the Hillsdale ad, Jonah Goldberg wrote:

I know it comes as a shock to the brand of (all-white) liberals who staff the ramparts at the American Prospect.

Well, I'm not white and neither are others on our staff. If Goldberg's going to fling absolutes around, he should get them right.

And as far as the ad goes, it does have an only-certain-people-are-wanted-at-this-school flavor. I saw it immediately. Goldberg probably did not because many white people, of all political persuasions, are blind to the racial implications of things around them.

When I looked at the ad, I saw a school where I didn't think my family would be wanted. Reading the small text was not on my agenda after I saw the photo and the accompanying caption. "Good old days" is a loaded phrase and has been, particularly for blacks, for a long time in this country. That's not the fault of black people. But that's not something that many white people are going to see or recognize or care about.

Hillsdale may have fabulous racial diversity, but you can't tell that from the ad. The ad shows white, I saw white, and I assumed white. Not because I'm a liberal, but because I'm not white. And I'm certain that there are plenty of other blacks and other people of color -- regardless of their political views -- who would feel the same way.

--Melanie Alston-Akers

SPIN AND MEDIA BIAS. The Baltimore City Paper's Brian Morton has a nice column up on liberal media bias, focusing on how Arnold Schwarzenegger used that old hobbyhorse to defend himself against allegations of sexual harassment during the final days of his campaign for governor. It's definitely worth reading. Meanwhile, Gallup finds that nearly half of Americans think that the news media is too liberal -- which didn't surprise me, since nearly half the country also voted for President Bush. But interestingly, the polls show that the two groups (conservatives and people who think the media is too biased) don't completely overlap; in fact, 30 percent of self-described conservatives think the media is about right, along with 44 percent of moderates and 50 percent of liberals.

Gallup notes that the overall numbers haven't changed much over the last few years, which is surprising given the many well-publicized and apparently widely read conservative books that have come out recently claiming pervasive liberal media bias. It looks like Bernard Goldberg and Ann Coulter have been preaching to the converted.

--Nick Confessore

TRAIL MIX: CLARK'S GRASSROOTS ERUPTION? A writer over at Stirling Newberry's Draft Clark Web site yesterday launched one heck of a shot across the bow in a strongly worded attack on the nascent Clark campaign, now picked up by The Associated Press.

Here are some facts about the role of Clark's grassroots support to put this into context: The leaders of the two most important Clark movement organizations have been integrated into the Clark campaign. John Hlinko, co-founder of DraftWesleyClark.com; Eric Carbone, also of DraftWesleyClark.com; and Dave Koehler, of the unofficial Wesley Clark Weblog are all now part of the Clark '04 Internet team and will be blogging for Clark. DraftWesleyClark.com's Maya Israel is now in the Clark '04 press office, booking television appearances. DraftClark2004.com's Josh Lerner is directing technology efforts. Matt Stoller of the ClarkSphere was on his way to Little Rock to volunteer. Denyse Castle of Women4Clark is already embedded in the campaign. There are many, many more members of the movement who are also joining up or heading down to Little Rock.

I also have to say -- and this is more social anthropology than reporting -- that the enthusiasm for Clark in Washington shows no sign of abating. Clark clearly thrills the hearts of Senate staffers and speechwriters from Capitol Hill to Georgetown. For the past nine months I was getting lectured on why Sen. John Edwards (D-N.C.) was the only hope for the Democratic Party; those lecturers now say it's all about Clark. Most of the normally sedate political staffers of my acquaintance have become rabid Clarkies, and they've all given him money. (Thus my first question when Clark files his FEC report: How much of that $3.5 million came from zip codes in and around the D.C. area?) Clark-friendly blogs -- like Angry Bear and former Senate staffer Amy Sullivan's Political Aims -- have launched attacks on me for my reporting on the Draft movement, and last night I was trying to make a simple financial transaction with the guy who's renting my parking space when it turned out that he, too, is trying to figure out a way to get down to Little Rock.

So, uh, will all the chaos of the last week hurt Clark? The short answer is probably, some, sure, how could it not? Fowler's departure took three other people with it and caused another to turn down a job with the Clark campaign. These were not grassroots people, either, but the sort of experienced campaign professionals capable of putting together a ground operation in the early states that Clark needs. Now Clark will have to start that up from scratch again, a month after announcing.

Watching the Clark campaign gear up I am amazed that the Dean campaign was able to keep a lid on its grassroots operation as well as it did. Then I remember: It didn't. Someone once created a whole Web site, HeyJoe, devoted to giving Dean campaign manager Joe Trippi unsolicited advice and criticism on how to run the Dean campaign's online strategy. Trippi found a way to move his critic into a productive role and adopted some of the ideas he was given. Every time the Dean campaign holds Meetups, people list complaints on Dean-blog open threads afterwards. Dan Conley's DeanBlog exists for no other reason than to give running positive and negative commentary on Howard Dean.

In short, running an open campaign means being subjected to a constant stream of criticism and unsolicited, often-blunt advice from supporters. This can be great, because it gives campaigns access to what is essentially a free, real-time, rolling focus group comprising thousands of people. Campaigns that know how to integrate the grassroots see all the criticism as helpful. Campaigns that circle the wagons and see themselves as under attack will, I suspect, ultimately loose their grassroots supporters.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

TRAIL MIX: LEHANE IS IN THE BUILDING. According to four sources affiliated with the Clark campaign in various capacities, Sen. John Kerry's former media adviser Chris Lehane touched down in Little Rock Tuesday and was spotted in the offices of Clark '04. Lehane's close compatriot and business partner Mark Fabiani just won an internal campaign power struggle with former acting campaign manager Donnie Fowler, and, say two of the sources, Lehane will be advising Clark in the future in a yet to be determined role. He was also there to help his wife, attorney and Clark '04 staffer Andrea Evans, move in, say the sources.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

GOVERNORS AND PRESIDENTS. Don't believe the headline -- "Recall May Help Bush, But State Still a Battleground" -- on Ron Brownstein's article on the national implications of the California recall. As Brownstein's article pretty clearly shows, recall or no recall, California is a safe Democratic state, not a battleground:

In 2000, Bush and the Republican National Committee spent $12.4 million in advertising in the state's five largest television markets, while Gore spent nothing in California, according to ad tracking done for The Times by the Campaign Media Analysis Group. Yet Gore won the state by a commanding 53% to 42%.

Also, Bush's position in California has been battered by some of the same economic discontent that crippled Davis. A Public Policy Institute survey last month found that Californians now preferred an unnamed Democrat over Bush in 2004 by 46% to 37%.

I'm a bit puzzled as to why this topic even seems to keep coming up. Take a gander at the list of current Democratic governors and you'll see donkeys at the helm of states like Kansas, Virginia, Mississippi and Wyoming that aren't on the top of anyone's list for likely 2004 Democratic pickups. Local elections are fought on local issues and don't typically have anything to do with presidential politics.

--Matthew Yglesias

TAKE A SECOND LOOK. If Jonah Goldberg is going to level a charge of hypocrisy at my colleagues, I wish he would examine his evidence more closely first. First there is the question of whether we were "indignant" (Goldberg's word) when Atrios attacked us. Here was our response:

Finally, Atrios, apparently seeking to prove the white supremacist leanings of this fine magazine, posts pictures of members of our staff -- damn, he nailed us! Since the race and ethnicity of a magazine's contributors are apparently Atrios' most reliable indicator of liberal virtue and sensibility on issues of race, then he had best buy a subscription to National Review. After all, that particular journal counts [Kathryn Jean] Lopez and Ramesh Ponnuru, who are presumably of Latino and South Asian descent, respectively, among its senior staff.

Does that really sound "indignant" to Jonah? To paraphrase Inigo Montoya, I do not think that word means what you think it means.

Second, Atrios, in his misguided attack on the Prospect, did not link to a "group photo." As far as I know, there is no group photo to speak of on the Prospect Web site. Instead, Atrios plucked out individual photos from our site and elswhere of our three founding editors, our editor-at-large, our incoming (at the time) executive editor, some guy I don't recognize but who is probably a contributor, and incoming (at the time) writing fellow Matthew Yglesias, all of whom are white. The Prospect does, of course, have contributors and staffers who are not white, none of whose pictures Atrios posted, but our response was and is that, by itself, the racial makeup of our staff is a preposterous way to judge whether or not our positions on affirmative action or identity politics or anything else are the correct ones.

The difference between that and putting the words "Want to Bring Back 'The Good Old Days'?" over a picture of six apple-cheeked, well-scrubbed white kids is, or should be, obvious to anyone. To recap, for Jonah's benefit: Pictures of white people: Fine. Pictures of white people paired with tag lines that seem to hearken back to the "good old days" of de facto school segregation: Questionable, at best.

--Nick Confessore

CONDUMB. According to The Guardian, the Vatican is claiming that people should not use condoms because they are permeable to HIV -- despite pretty much no scientific evidence that this is the case.

The Church makes this argument in a BBC documentary called Sex and the Holy City, which will air in England this weekend. Some highlights:

Sex and the Holy City includes a Catholic nun advising her HIV-infected choirmaster against using condoms with his wife because "the virus can pass through".

And:

Gordon Wambi told the programme: "Some priests have even been saying that condoms are laced with HIV/Aids."

Terrific.

--Thomas Lang

AN IMMINENT THREAT? Andrew Sullivan charges Ted Kennedy with charging George W. Bush of describing Saddam Hussein as posing an imminent threat to the United States when, according to Sullivan, Bush never said any such thing. Meanwhile, the official Bush blog says that David Kay's report "does indeed prove that conditions in Iraq posed an imminent threat to the United States and the world." Still with me? Good, because Fred Kaplan says the report says no such thing.

--Matthew Yglesias

MORE ON HILLSDALE. Jonah Goldberg calls me a "bigot" for my earlier post on this ad placed by Hillsdale Academy in National Review. Then he goes after me again (here and here) and Aaron Bailey, another National Review staffer, adds his thoughts (here). Much of their outrage takes the form of a generic toast to the virtues of Hillsdale College and Hillsdale Academy. "A smarter and more decent bunch of high school kids, I've never met," Goldberg writes, while Bailey (an alum) notes that the college refused an invitation to the 1955 Tangerine Bowl "because the event organizers would not let Hillsdale's black students play." I also learned from Bailey that Hillsdale sent many of its students to fight for the Union in the Civil War. None of this has any bearing on the ad, of course. Goldberg and Bailey might have just as easily noted that in 1999, an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education described administrators censoring the college's student newspaper and featured a veteran professor alleging that the place was "a community of fear." Or that an article three years prior in the same publication quoted an employee and former employee, respectively, describing the school as "a Gestapo police state" and "a Stalinist kind of environment." Or that, as National Review itself wrote in 1999, the college's refusal to take federal funds means that students cannot accept GI benefits. (Which, I might add, is just as disgraceful as the exclusion of ROTC and other military-recruiting programs from certain Ivy League campuses.) Then there was a little matter involving some allegations about a former president and his daughter-in-law. No need to get into those.

All of which is to say that I'm sure Goldberg, Bailey and I can agree that Hillsdale has had some good moments and some bad moments in its history -- and none of them has anything to do with this argument. I didn't pick on Hillsdale because it's a conservative school. And I didn't pick on other schools for being Christian, as Goldberg alleges by calling me a "bigot." I noted that the rest of National Review's supplement contained ads mostly for obscure religious institutions -- a category that Hillsdale doesn't even fall into. I didn't pick on Hillsdale for what it is, I picked on it for what it did -- place an ad in National Review that seems designed to appeal to some pretty lousy impulses in a certain breed of parent.

First, Goldberg defends the school by noting that only a small percentage of the local population from which it draws students is black. Then, he defends the school (or rather the school's headmaster defends the school) by noting that Hillsdale's student body is 12 percent minority. Both arguments are designed (in opposite ways, of course) to defend the school against having an all-white photo. But I'm not talking about the photo. I'm talking about the ad. The school happened to have a photo of white students. Fine. There's nothing wrong with a school having a mostly white student body. And there's nothing wrong with having a photo that advertises that fact honestly. The weird part is what Hillsdale Academy did with that photo by placing it under a headline encouraging parents to relive "the good old days" by sending their kids to Hillsdale.

What do they mean by the phrase "the good old days"? It's impossible to know for sure, of course, but Goldberg doesn't offer any possibilities to counter my suggestion. By itself, that phrase could mean anything. Taken together with an all-white picture (in an age where the conventions of educational advertising, like them or hate them, mean that most schools use such photos as a chance to show off their diversity) and the ad's rather glib denunciation of "politically correct" revisionism, it's enough to make you wonder whether there is a racial subtext at play here.

Obviously there were a lot of things that were different about schools in "the good old days." But segregation -- both de jure and de facto -- looms pretty large in that history. In the context of an ad that raises race implicitly by discussing "politically correct" revisionism, how can Goldberg find it so outrageous to wonder if "the good old days" doesn't carry racial implications? And I'm not talking about the days of southern governors standing in schoolhouse doors and education being rigidly segregated by state law. I'm talking about that not-so-distant past, when parents of privilege in all parts of the country just didn't have to worry about their kids going to school with blacks or Jews or poor kids because those kinds of kids didn't go to the schools where they sent their children. If Goldberg doesn't believe that such a time existed, he's the one who's engaged in a little revisionism. If he doesn't think that nostalgia for such a time can be conjured -- and perhaps intended -- by an ad that invokes "the good old days" and refers implicitly to race, then he's not living in the real world with the rest of us.

Goldberg wonders what I would think of a similar ad for a historically black college. But no black school would advertise itself by harkening back to "the good old days" -- and if Goldberg thinks really really hard, I'll bet he can come up with some reasons why.

--Richard Just

ABOUT THAT BOTULISM. Harvard biology grad student Alexander Platt writes in to say I was wrong yesterday when I said David Kay had discovered a vial of botulism toxin:

This is not correct and is exactly what he'd like you to think. The vial is of the bacteria, botulinum, and definitely not the toxin that the bacteria can, in certain cases, create. You've eaten plenty of the stuff yourself. The warning on jars of honey that suggest not giving it to kids under the age of 1 refers to this organism. There's a reasonable amount of it in most honey (and dirt, and...) and everyone over the age of 1 needn't even think about its presence.

Read more about the grave threat Iraq posed to America's infant population here, where you're advised to "always wash your hands well before eating and after you go to the bathroom" in order to guard against botulism. Good advice for us all.

--Matthew Yglesias

SADDAM AND 9-11. It would appear that the White House, faced with setbacks in Iraq, is choosing to mount a new PR offensive against the administration's critics, rather than actually devising a policy response. Even more unfortunately, the new strategy seems to involve reviving the campaign of obfuscation regarding Hussein's involvement in 9-11 that was temporarily put on hold after Dick Cheney's much-mocked Meet The Press appearance:

More than 100,000 U.S. troops are now leading the occupation of Iraq, which President Bush now calls the "central front" of the war on terrorism that began with the September 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington.

Though no evidence links Iraq to those attacks, Rice said Saddam could one day have provided chemical or biological weapons "to mount a future attack beyond the scale of 9/11 -- and that terrible prospect could not be put aside."

. . .

Vice President Dick Cheney will speak Friday, too, and is "expected to engage a little more in the debate" over whether the United States should have gone to war in Iraq and to talk about Iraq's threat in the context of September 11 as a "watershed," the senior official said.

This is the strategy the administration used up until a few weeks ago, and it's worked very well for them: Never actually say that Iraq was involved in 9-11 -- if you do that the media will call you on it -- just constantly mention the two issues in the same sentence so as to imply that they're connected and you'll get a free pass. The latest poll (it's question 86, so you'll need to read a while to find it) I've seen on the subject suggests that "only" 43 percent of the public still believes this, so the president had better get cracking if he wants to obfuscate his way to re-election.

--Matthew Yglesias

THE TREND THAT ISN'T. The old rule of thumb used to be that it takes three to make a bogus trend, but what with the faster news cycle, the quota seems to have been reduced to one. Hence last Sunday's New York Times carried an article arguing that Arnold Schwarzenegger heralds the rise of a new breed of "big tent" Republicans, while today Andrew Sullivan crows about the dawning of a "revolution" in the Republican Party.

I'd like to believe that this is true and that the GOP is about to become a party of social moderates, but my head tells me it ain't gonna happen. After all, to find a time when California was governered by a socially moderate Republican you need to look way back to . . . 1998 when Pete Wilson held the office. Back then, the similarly moderate George Pataki was governor of New York and he still has the job today. Similarly, the 1990s saw a lot of states in the Deep South governed by moderate Democrats who were out of step with the national party -- and we've still got Ronnie Musgrove in Mississippi and Mike Easely in North Carolina.

The moral of the story is simply that state politics aren't national politics, and the two parties tend to adjust their positions to suit the different electorates of each state.

Moderates who go to Washington as representatives or senators wind up in an awkward position because they're subject to the discipline of caucus leaders and sometimes, like Jim Jeffords most recently and Richard Shelby in the other direction, they wind up switching parties. Governors have a much easier time straying from party orthodoxy. The remarkable thing about the California GOP isn't that there's a moderate at the helm today; it's that the party has spent five years putting up candidates who were unelectably conservative.

--Matthew Yglesias

DON'T ASK, DON'T TELL. The president's typical confidence and determination seemed to fail him at yesterday's brief chat with reporters:

"I don't know if we're going to find out the senior administration official," the president said in response to a reporter's question. "Now, this is a large administration, and there's a lot of senior officials. I don't have any idea."

Well, that's a good point, except for the fact that it isn't true. Considering that the majority of senior officials in the administration -- Secretary of Agriculture Ann Veneman, say -- pretty clearly had nothing to do with this, there are at best a couple dozen people who could be responsible. It wouldn't be very hard for the president to just ask them. Press Secretary Scott McClellan, meanwhile, seems to have hit on the "ask" strategy:

At the briefing, press secretary Scott McClellan repeated his categorical denial that three prominent White House officials -- Bush's senior adviser Karl Rove, Vice President Cheney's Chief of Staff I. Lewis Libby and National Security Council official Elliott Abrams -- had leaked the information or authorized leaks, saying that he had spoken directly to the officials.

Good for him. Now why is it that he -- or better yet, the president himself -- can't just go around and ask the rest of the potential suspects? If the president thinks his own senior staff can't be trusted to tell the truth, then he ought to come out and say so -- I would agree with him for once. Admittedly, it might take a few days to go through all the necessary inquiries, but they've already had a couple of months since the Novak column came out to get to the bottom of this.

--Matthew Yglesias

MARITAL PROBLEMS, YES. BIGGER PROBLEMS, YOU BET. Marriages fail for a lot of reasons, but this is a new one: Nine-term congressman Cass Ballenger (R-N.C.), who separated from his wife of 50 years last November, told The Charlotte Observer a few days ago that his marriage failed because he and his wife lived across the street from a Capitol Hill-based Muslim advocacy group, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR):

Ballenger said in the post 9-11 environment in Washington, his wife, a homemaker, was anxious about all the activity at CAIR, including people unloading boxes and women "wearing hoods," or headscarves, going in and out of the office building on New Jersey Avenue. "That's 2 1/2 blocks from the Capitol," he added, "and they could blow it up."

A CAIR spokesman called this analysis "bigotry" and "unworthy of an elected official at the national level."

Ya think?

Ballenger also made news last December when, in the midst of the Strom Thurmond-Trent Lott uproar, he told the Observer that he had experienced "segregationalist feeling" in his dealings with black congresswoman Cynthia McKinney (who was defeated in 2002) because she was "such a bitch."

As if "hoods" weren't cause enough to end his marriage, Ballenger also blamed his breakup on the gift ban enacted by Congress in 1995:

Another stress on their marriage: the decision by "we holier-than-thou Republicans" in the House, Ballenger said, to ban gifts -- including meals and theater tickets from lobbyists -- that once meant "a social life for (congressional) wives."

It's a shame that this rule ruined Ballenger’s relationship, especially since he voted for it.

Muslims. Gift bans. It's easy to see why Ballenger and his wife couldn't quite make things work. Plus: "We always argued a lot," he told the Observer.

--Heidi Pauken

TRAIL MIX: DONNIE FOWLER OUT. Boy, that was fast. Donnie Fowler has quit as Wesley Clark's campaign manager. The Associated Press has the story:

Fowler has complained that while the Internet-based draft-Clark supporters have been integrated into the campaign, their views are not taken seriously by senior advisers, many of them with deep Washington ties. He has warned Clark's team that the campaign is being driven from Washington, a charge leveled against Gore's campaign in 2000 even though it was headquartered in Tennessee.

Hmm . . . where have I heard this before? Fowler, who was acting as the campaign manager, is one smart cookie and reportedly had been able to smooth over all kinds of egos in the first weeks of the campaign. But apparently it wasn't enough. I've been hearing for days that the nascent Clark campaign is divided into three factions: campaign professionals, former Draft Clark people and friends of Clark from Arkansas. With Fowler gone, watch for some of the Draft people to clash with the Washington types even more. One of the smarter political observers I know in DC was telling me last night that he's giving the campaign about two more weeks to get its act together. If it can't do that, then it really may be too late for Clark.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

TRAIL MIX: AND THE WINNER IS . . . Wesley Clark (of the Jamal Simmons sweepstakes, that is). After being courted by a couple of campaigns, Simmons, Sen. Bob Graham's former press secretary, will be leaving sunny Florida for the Clark campaign, where he'll serve as traveling press secretary. Word on the street is that Graham's New Hampshire staffers may also be finding -- or at least trying to find -- employment with the most famous new member of the Democratic Party. (That's right, as of yesterday, Clark's officially a Democrat, according to The Washington Times.)

Note: Trail Mix will be a regular Tapped item, featuring news, notes and observations about the 2004 campaign.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

QUARTERBACK DRAW. It's a little late in the game, but TAP Online has today what we think is pretty much the definitive debunking of Rush Limbaugh's contention that the media wants black quarterbacks to succeed because of "social concern." The piece is by Duke economist Jacob L. Vigdor, who last year used a statistical analysis of five years worth of Monday Night Football broadcasts to determine that viewers are more likely to tune into games involving black quarterbacks. Which means that the media's interest in promoting black quarterbacks isn't an example of liberal "social concern" -- it's an example of old-fashioned attention to the bottom line. Read the whole thing here.

--Richard Just

BUSH BLOG VS. AFGHAN REALITY. Confirming that this particular trend is definitely no longer cool, I see that the Bush-Cheney 2004 campaign now has a blog. I also see that the eager beavers in the White House have already figured out how to turn this particular format into yet another tool for dishonesty. Consider this entry:

This report confirms that efforts to rebuild Afghanistan continue to be successfu. Two years after the war on terror began against the Taliban, the signs of renewal are everywhere and both boys and girls are attending school together for the first time.

Follow the link however, and you'll see an Associated Press story on the Web site of a local TV news channel in Connecticut reporting "at least some positive change in Afghanistan" along with the fact that "Taliban militants may launch 'spectacular attacks' against U.S.-led coalition forces," a considerably less rosy picture. Now I have no doubt that life in Afghanistan is better today than it was under the Taliban, but this doesn't change the fact that the postwar situation over there has been shamefully neglected by the administration. A lengthy Washington Post article yesterday makes it sound like the situation may head further downhill as Hamid Karzai's coalition fractures and the plans for getting democracy up and running face continuing delays. And over here another AP story reports that Taliban attacks are forcing many aid programs to shut down.

--Matthew Yglesias

GOT A NICKLES? The Associated Press reports that Republican senator Don Nickles may not run for re-election in 2004, which would complicate GOP efforts to hold onto the Senate:

As whip during the previous several years, he often clashed behind the scenes with then-Majority Leader Trent Lott, R-Miss. And when Lott became embroiled in a racially charged controversy over the winter, it was Nickles who first said publicly that rank-and-file Republicans should look elsewhere for a new leader.

That began a series of events that led to Lott's decision to step aside and the selection of Sen. Bill Frist, R-Tenn., as the new Republican leader.

That doesn't tell us much, but I suspect one reason Nickles is stepping down is that he was passed over for majority leader by the White House. During Trent Lott's tenure as majority leader, hardline conservatives who were dissatisfied with Lott's dealmaking proclivities privately backed Nickles as a replacement, and Nickles himself would occasionally make noises about the need for new leadership. But with Lott now out, and Bill Frist settled in as the top Senate Republican, Nickles may have decided that this was a good time to get out.

(If Nickles doesn't run, it would qualify as yet another example of the phenomenon Mary Lynn F. Jones writes about today at TAP Online -- both parties are having a hard time convincing people to run for the Senate.)

--Nick Confessore

THE LEFT IN POWER. The Wall Street Journal's editorial page takes a step back from the Arnold scandals to say that California's current mess goes to show what kind of terrible things happen when liberals are put in charge:

But then the energy crisis hit, and rather than tell voters the truth [Davis] embraced his party's anti-business base to survive. The result has been spending that has climbed 40% in four years, a $38 billion budget deficit, and business and energy costs that have caused tens of thousands to flee the state.

And:

But if Californians can look past these distractions, they will see a state brought low by deliberate policies and interests that they now have a chance to restrain and repudiate. And whether or not the recall succeeds, the rest of America has had an object lesson in how a liberal Congress and Presidency would govern.

Ah yes, if we put a liberal in the White House, then we'll get skyrocketing deficits and large-scale job losses. Good thing we dodged that bullet and got George W. Bush instead. Someone let me know when Paul Gigot starts pushing to get Bush recalled and I'll start paying attention. The Journal's downplaying of the groping allegations ("distractions") against Arnold Schwarzennegger is also a bit, shall we say, ill at ease with the paper's fanatical devotion to Clinton-related scandals.

--Matthew Yglesias

ARNOLD'S BEST FRIENDS. Newsweek's Gersh Kuntzman delivers an indictment of his own profession in this column about media coverage of the recall, which really has been atrocious in every way.

How, exactly, did a second-rate actor earn front-runner status? As a member of the media, I have met the enemy and it is us. We reporters have let the supposed next governor surge to the lead -- which we back up with our own duplicitous polls, of course -- without answering a single question about how he would lead the world's fifth-largest economy. What we have asked him, of course, is whether he tried to grab a woman’s breast in the 1980s (what single man didn't?). And we think we have done our jobs when we uncover an old interview in which the candidate described the joy of having sex with two women at the same time (again, what single man...oh, never mind) or that he once mentioned the word "Hitler" in the same sentence as "admire." Where were the reporters who could point out that a man can not claim to be an environmentalist yet drive a Hummer? Where were the columnists who should have been pointing out that a man can't say he's pro-immigration but want to deprive some immigrants of benefits? Where were the writers reminding us that the bloated budgets of most action movies are hardly a model of fiscal restraint? Alas, where was the coverage?

Instead, we in the media let this recall train leave the station. We blamed Davis for California's energy "crisis" two years ago (which, would you believe it?, was actually a result of Enron and other energy traders cooking the books). As apt as Davis’s first name actually is, he is not the kind of elected official for whom the recall law was written. He has not violated the public trust. He has not committed treason. He has not exhibited immoral or criminal behavior. You may think he’s doing a bad job as governor, but the standard for firing an elected official should be much higher than merely disagreeing with his approach to governing and having a right-wing Congressman in your state who has several million dollars with which to pay the so-called "volunteers" to man the recall barricades. Where was the coverage that should have called the effort what it is: a coup?

Instead, we in the media dubbed the entire proceedings a "circus" -- even as we provided all three rings.

I don't agree with everything Kuntzman says. (For one thing, I hope that "what single man" line is a joke. More importantly, Schwarzenegger didn't just grab some woman's breast in the 1980s. There's now an established, long-running and contemporary -- the last incident on record was alleged to have occurred in 2000 -- pattern of ugly behavior towards women on his part. That's a legitimate character issue.) But I can't disagree with Kuntzman's despair over how the media has let Schwarzenegger get this far without answering basic questions about how he would govern.

--Nick Confessore

THE GOOD OLD DAYS. One page of National Review's new special supplement on higher education is, I think, worthy of special recognition. The supplement is filled with ads for various schools -- mostly obscure religious institutions such as Christendom College in Front Royal, Va., and Franciscan University of Steubenville, Ohio. But on page 18, there is an ad for Hillsdale Academy, a kindergarten-through-12th-grade school located in Michigan. The top of the ad reads, "Want to Bring Back 'The Good Old Days'?" and beneath it is a photo of six white kids.

You can look at the ad and decide for yourself exactly what kind of good old days the folks at Hillsdale Academy are seeking to bring back. I didn't think the message was too thinly veiled.

--Richard Just

IT'S COME TO THIS. In case you think that the California recall race resembles a wacky TV show, the Game Show Network (GSN) has turned your thoughts into reality. While scanning TV this weekend, I came across Who Wants to be Governor of California? The Debating Game on GSN. Gary Coleman, Trek Thunder Kelly (the guy who only wears blue), exotic dancer Mary Carey, two students and some other guy answered questions about California in the hopes of winning points and time to speak.

The show doesn't just sound like a joke; it is one. The questions asked were silly; the responses more so.

Then again, a game show featuring Al Gore and George W. Bush being asked questions about the United States might have been fun -- and illuminating.

--Melanie Alston-Akers

THE REAL SCANDAL. One thing that's become clear over the past week or so is that "real scandal" appears to be a synonym for "fake scandal," at least in conservative circles. Thus comes Jed Babbin in NRO with another attempt to convince us that . . .

the leak while titillating, is unimportant. While we occupy ourselves with the Plame name blame game, we are missing the most important elements of the Wilson affair: the anomalies.

The important question here, says Babbin, is to figure out why such an important mission would have been entrusted to an unqualified, strident opponent of the administration like Joseph Wilson. The answer, as Kevin Drum has helpfully pointed out, is that Wilson was very qualified for work in Africa and wasn't a Bush-basher until the Bush team started covering up his work and trying to wreck his wife's career.

The point of bringing up these charges against Wilson is twofold. On the one hand, it's an effort to distract attention from the Plame scandal. On the other hand, it's an attempt to turn back the clock several months and rehabilitate the president's infamous 16 words in the State of the Union address by discrediting Wilson's report.

The trouble here is that Wilson's report was credible; indeed it was so credible that the White House itself conceded months ago that it never should have made the claim about Saddam Hussein trying to get uranium from Africa. If the editors of National Review have some kind of secret pipeline to intelligence that the Bush administration is missing, they really ought to give weapons hunter David Kay a call and let him know about it, since thus far he's been reduced to pointing toward a single vial of botulism toxin stored in a scientist's refrigerator as evidence of the Iraqi WMD threat.

--Matthew Yglesias

A ONE-DAY BREAK. TAP Online and Tapped will not publish tomorrow because of Yom Kippur. We will return on Tuesday.

GOOD JOURNALISM VS. BAD. Supporters of Fox News like to argue that, by virtue of being more balanced and playing it down the middle, the network gets it right where other news outlets, mired in liberal bias and opinioneering, get it wrong. But a new study out from the Program on International Policy Attitudes at the University of Maryland suggests (among other things) that Fox News viewers are literally less well-informed about some basic facts than viewers of other, putatively slanted news sources. The study does reflect badly on the media as a whole, of course. In the aggregate, the researchers found, an unfortunately large number of Americans have been misinformed about the degree of foreign support for the Iraq war; whether or not we've found WMDs in Iraq; and whether or not Saddam Hussein was involved with the 9-11 attacks. But in looking more closely at the results, the study reports:

The extent of Americans' misperceptions vary significantly depending on their source of news. Those who receive most of their news from Fox News are more likely than average to have misperceptions. Those who receive most of their news from NPR or PBS are less likely to have misperceptions. These variations cannot simply be explained as a result of differences in the demographic characteristics of each audience, because these variations can also be found when comparing the demographic subgroups of each audience.

How much worse is Fox than its competitors? According to a chart on page 13 of the study, 80 percent of the respondents who watched it had one or more misperceptions. This was slightly worse than CBS (71 percent), significantly worse than ABC and rival CNN (55 percent) and way worse than the print media (47 percent). NPR and PBS do especially well in the study. The researchers report:

Fox News watchers were most likely to hold misperceptions -- and were three times more likely than the next nearest network to hold all three misperceptions. In the audience for NPR/PBS, however, there was an overwhelming majority who did not have any of the three misperceptions, and hardly any had all three.

That's quite a rebuke to Fox's self-image as the most straight-shooting news source in America -- and to conservatives who believe NPR is hopelessly biased to the left. So when it comes to reporting on the war, folks, here's the box score. Ideologically driven, overtly partisan cable news network funded by a conservative media tycoon: 0. Neutral, nonprofit, nonpartisan radio and television networks funded in part by taxpayers: 1.

Please -- do touch that dial.

--Nick Confessore

BROOKINGS THE MATCHMAKER. A new policy brief from Brookings should help shed some light on why progressives don't always consider the think tank to be all that, well, progressive. Work and Marriage: The Way to End Poverty and Welfare includes statements regarding marriage that will make Heritage Foundation writers think someone stole their lines.

In a simulation featuring "virtual marriages," the Brookings authors matched "single mothers and unmarried men who are similar in age, education, and race" (located through the census). And lo and behold, success! "With a few exceptions, we find no shortage of unmarried men for these women to marry," the authors say. Who knew it was so simple? I mean, if the Census Bureau says there are eligible men around, well, I guess there are.

Now what about those exceptions. The major one is "within the African-American population" where "[t]his shortage may be the result of the large number of young minority men who are incarcerated or dead" or not found by the Census Bureau. Incarcerated or dead? Given that this is a policy brief, one expects to see policy suggestions, but the authors offer none for this population. Even if one believes that getting low-income men and women walking down the aisle together will solve their problems, African-American women (not to mention African-American men) are apparently out of luck.

And so are lesbian single mothers. The report, despite the fact that the authors tout the benefits of two incomes for families, speaks only of the man-woman marriage contract. An interesting policy recommendation would have been to broaden the scope of marriage for all. But I guess we'll have to wait for one of those progressive think tanks to come up with that.

--Melanie Alston-Akers

FACT CHECK DEAN. Speaking of Wesley Clark's party affiliation, Franklin Foer wants to know why Howard Dean is telling people that Clark "was a Republican until 25 days ago" when he was no such thing. Bob Schieffer apparently had to straighten Dean out on this question a few days ago, but that's not stopping him from using the line.

-- Matthew Yglesias

BUSH'S POLL PROBLEM. The latest New York Times poll confirms what other organizations have been telling us -- the president's once sky-high approval ratings have fallen back to where they were before 9-11. Perhaps most disturbing for the White House is the fact that just 37 percent of the public thinks the country is "generally going in the right direction" while 56 percent says "things have pretty seriously gotten off on the wrong track."

Still, two recent articles -- one by Fred Barnes and another by Gary Gregg -- make the point that the president is far from doomed, and those arguments are fundamentally correct. Approval ratings a year ahead of the election have no real predictive value in terms of the ultimate results.

But that doesn't mean the president is out of the woods, either. A popular president can count on the uniform support of his party in Congress and slice off vulnerable members of the opposition party. An unpopular president, on the other hand, faces a united opposition and risks defections from his own side. As Prospect co-editor Robert Kuttner recently noted, this process has already begun, with a string of congressional votes going the wrong way for the administration -- and today comes another as the House rejects a Bush proposal to change the overtime pay rules.

And it's not just the Bush legislative agenda that's at stake either. So far the White House has succeeded in maintaining GOP support for its stance against a special counsel to investigate the Valerie Plame leak, but the further Bush falls in the polls the less likely it becomes that the wall of partisan solidarity will hold up.

-- Matthew Yglesias

FACT CHECK CLARK, PART II. Blogger Rick Klau has the goods on another example of what is becoming a pattern of easily avoidable inaccurate claims from the Clark camp. Earlier this week, Clark granted an interview to uberblogger Joshua Micah Marshall. It was just one interview the Clark camp tried to place with bloggers this week, and it was part of a broader strategy of trying to create a network of bloggers who could stir up Clark chatter in the blogosphere, according to my Clark sources. And it's a pretty smart strategy: The Talking Points Memo interview provided Clark with a chance to give the sort of nuanced, thorough explanations of his policy stances and political beliefs that more traditional news outlets would never have space for -- and Clark acquitted himself very well in the interview.

But then his team announced on Clark04.com: "During the General's recent trip to Washington D.C., Joshua Marshall over at the well-known Talking Points Memo did an interview enroute from Dulles Airport. This is the first time a blogger has interviewed a presidential candidate."

This simply wasn't true. Liberal Oasis interviewed Howard Dean by e-mail back in May. Klau pointed this out and the Clark bloggers changed their story.

As of last night, Clark04.com was claiming: "Tuesday General Wesley K. Clark (Ret.), Democratic candidate for President, participated in the first face-to-face interview granted to a blogger."

But this isn't true, either.

I personally witnessed Dean being chatted up by bloggers during the Sleepless Summer Tour in August, both individually and as part of group press availabilities. In fact, the plane at times seemed overrun with bloggers, several of whom were invited guests on the trip, cross-posting to both the Dean campaign's Blog for America and their own blogs. David Weinberger of JohoTheBlog wrote about one of those conversations in August. Now, that interview was a much shorter, less formal affair than Clark's interview with Marshall. It resulted in a less significant posting, and it was less widely read than the Marshall interview will be. But it happened, nonetheless. And it happened first.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

FACT CHECK CLARK, PART I. Good grief. This is getting ridiculous. First Wesley Clark told The Union Leader of New Hamsphire, when asked how long he'd been a Democrat: "About, um, oh, I think it was maybe the third of September. Prior to that I wasn’t anything. In Arkansas, you don't register for parties, you vote in primaries and, of course, I voted in the Democratic primary."

Then on Wednesday it turned out he still hadn't registered as a Democrat.

Then on Thursday, Clark's spokeswoman Kym Spell told The Associated Press: "A piece of paper doesn't make you a Democrat. . . . Wesley Clark is a real Democrat, and this is simply a tactic that the other guys are using to distract Americans from the real issues."

This is a disappointing answer, to say the least. Like Clark, I am an independent. But it was a big deal for me when I went down to the D.C. Department of Motor Vehicles and switched my party registration from Democrat to independent in 1999. It is that technicality only -- that little "piece of paper" -- that prevents me from calling myself a member of the Democratic Party. Yet it symbolizes a great deal more. And, because of that piece of paper, if I went around calling myself a Democrat, I'd be lying.

Certainly, it is true that few Arkansans register by political party because of the open primary system in that state. But Clark is not running for governor of Arkansas. He is running for president. And if you take politics seriously, you have to take your party affiliation seriously, too. Clark seems to have done this for most of his life. He intentionally kept himself apart from party politics while in the military, and that is a perfectly respectable -- even honorable -- thing to have done. But a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination is asking people not just to consider him as an individual, but as a potential leader of the party in whose name he is running. His role is not just to explain why he should be selected as the nominee, but to explain to the nation why the values and policies of his chosen party are ones they should support, too. If Clark wants to lead the Democrats -- as well as America -- his job is to explain why people should register as Democrats, donate to Democrats and vote for Democrats, not just donate to and vote for him.

Instead, Clark's spokeswoman is pooh-poohing the importance of joining the Democratic Party. Clark has said that one of his strengths is that he will bring new people into the party, and that he will bring disaffected former Democrats -- whose ranks are legion -- back into it. But if not technically being part of the party doesn't matter to Clark, why should it matter to anyone else?

UPDATE. A few more thoughts on this topic: The sad part of all this is that the question of party affiliation could have been handled in such a different way. Instead of coming across as disorganized and nonchalant about party registration, the Clark campaign could have made Clark's joining the Democratic Party into the very big deal that so many observers recognize it to be. For Clark to become a Democrat says something powerful about the state of the current Democratic Party, but it also says a lot about the contemporary Republican Party. In another era, Clark would have been a natural Republican -- and in that era, Clark did vote Republican. But today's Republican Party has veered so far to the right and become so riddled with insular cronyism that it has become inhospitable to many moderates, fiscal conservatives, internationalists and libertarians who previously felt welcome within its embrace. Clark could have highlighted this failure of the Republican Party, promoted dissension within its ranks and quelled any doubts about his loyalties in Democratic primary voters' minds -- by, for example, turning the hand-delivery of his Democratic Party voter registration in Arkansas into a media event at which he spoke out forcefully on behalf of today's Democratic Party and asked people to join him in joining it. There are probably many other ways he could have handled the situation that would have been equally acceptable. But his campaign shouldn't have implied that formal party affiliation doesn't matter. Clark's competitors will no doubt continue to make an issue of this subject, so Clark will continue to have opportunities to address it until he finds one that works.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

IT'S ALWAYS THE ONES WHO SHOUT THE LOUDEST. Over at Atrios, there's a nice collection of Rush Limbaugh transcripts (here, here and here) featuring the talk-show host inveighing against drug users in rather ungenerous terms. If you've been following the news, of course, you know of Limbaugh's alleged addiction to illegal prescription drugs and alleged connections to a ring that peddles them.

First we had the Republican family-values adulterers (Newt Gingrich, Bob Livingston, Helen Chenoweth and so many others). Then we had Bill Bennett, the set-boundaries-on-our-appetites scold who couldn't keep himself away from the slot machines. Now we have the possibility of Rush Limbaugh, alleged OxyContin-swilling drug warrior. Next up: The Washington Post reveals Lynne Cheney's past life teaching women's studies at Bennington, and an ACT-UP staffer catches Gary Bauer in a leather bar.

--Nick Confessore

ESPECIALLY INDEPENDENT. Today's Washington Post editorial alleging that "as if on cue from some offstage hypocrisy conductor, Republicans and Democrats have -- once again -- switched positions on the subject of independent counsels" would be more credible if Republicans and Democrats actually had once again switched positions on the subject of independent counsels. In fact, however, Democrats are now calling for the appointment of a special counsel, which sounds the same but isn't. Independent counsels like Kenneth Starr had unlimited funds and were appointed by a panel of judges. Existing law, however, no longer permits the appointment of such officials. Rather, the Attorney General may appoint a "special" counsel who will be outside of the Justice Department's day-to-day chain of command but who is nonetheless subject to being fired by political appointees.

Now it's quite true that there was a partisan flip-flop on the subject of independent counsels in the past. During the Reagan and Bush years, Republicans consistently argued (correctly, in my view) that the creation of independent counsels was unwise and unconstitutional. Democrats felt otherwise. Republicans changed their tune once Bill Clinton was in office and Starr's abuses convinced Democrats that their friends across the aisle had been right all along. As a result the independent counsel statute was allowed to expire, but the special prosecutor provisions that existed under pre-Watergate law are still in effect.

Admittedly, this is a small and somewhat confusing distinction, but you would think the editors of The Washington Post would be capable of following it more carefully -- especially since if Fred Hiatt had given a little more scrutiny to the original Robert Novak column, perhaps we wouldn't even be talking about all this.

-- Matthew Yglesias

WISHFUL THINKING? Today's edition of Best of The Web contains a valiant effort by James Taranto to convince us that no crimes were committed by the Valerie Plame leakers:

An employee of an intelligence agency is a "covert agent" for the purposes of the statute only if he "is serving outside the United States or has within the last five years served outside the United States." . . .

Wilson's bio says he worked for President Clinton as a special assistant between June 1997 and July 1998, which means he was based in Washington when he met Plame. If their kids are three years old, they would have been born in 1999 or 2000, and it seems reasonable to surmise that she was not stationed overseas as an expectant or new mother. If she has been stationed overseas during the past five years, then, the Wilson-Plame romance would have to have been a long-distance one at least during its first two years. So far as we are aware, no one has asserted that it was.

Interesting stuff, and even somewhat convincing until you remember that CIA officials certainly seem to think that Plame was a covert agent. After all, they are the ones who asked the Justice Department to launch an investigation, and presumably they wouldn't have asked for an investigation of something that wasn't a crime. So let's consider the possibilities:

1. Maybe the CIA does station "expectant or new" mothers abroad.

2. Maybe the Plame-Wilson romance was long-distance for some portion of its first two years.

3. Maybe Plame wasn't "stationed" abroad per se, but did take some trips and therefore "served" abroad.

4. Maybe the CIA doesn't know which of its agents are the covert ones.Now which of these options seems least plausible to you? I'm going to go with No. 4 -- it would be very odd for the CIA to be confused about this, especially given that it took the agency a couple of months to file the request for an investigation.

Conservatives really ought to stop covering for the administration on this story. It's perfectly possible to admit that something bad has happened here without becoming an enthusiast for refundable tax credits, affirmative action, the United Nations, universal health care, public education or whatever else it is that they don't like about the left. Currently, only the ethics and credibility of a few people working in the White House are at stake and there's no reason for the entire movement to cover itself in the sins of its fellow-travelers. Here's some advice to conservatives: Just say, "Look, this is bad, but on balance I still think Bush is better than the other guys."

--Matthew Yglesias

THE POLITICS OF PERSONAL DESTRUCTION. Close on the heels of the Valerie Plame scandal comes a new example of disgusting Republican scorched-earth politicking. An aide to Sen. Kit Bond (R-Mo.) has apparently been running a blog named, with classic Republican good taste, after the tail number -- "N8354N" -- on the plane that crashed in 2002 while carrying Democratic Missouri Gov. Mel Carnahan, his son, Randy Carnahan, and campaign aide Chris Sifford. Teagan Goddard has the cached version of the evil blog from Google, where someone operating under the name "John Coyote" posted items. "The title of this blog marks an inflection point in current Missouri politics -- on that day, the worm began to turn," reads the site, referring to the day Carnahan died.

The St. Louis Post Dispatch is reporting that the site was set up by the most senior public face in Bond's office:

The office of U.S. Sen. Christopher "Kit" Bond, R-Mo., said Thursday that Bond's chief spokesman, Ernie Blazar, was responsible for setting up the anti-Democrat website named N8354N, the number on the tail of the plane that crashed killing former Gov. Mel Carnahan, his son, Randy, and campaign aid Chris Sifford.

Bond's office said Blazar was no longer on the staff as of Thursday, but would not describe the circumstances of his departure.

Lovely.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

THE BENEFITS OF COMING CLEAN -- EARLY. No doubt many conservative pundits will cry foul about the Los Angeles Times' decision to release, just a few days before California's recall election, an investigative report about Arnold Schwarzenegger's alleged history of sexual harassment (which appears to consist largely of his penchant for grabbing women's breasts -- classy guy!). But I can't help but feel that Schwarzenegger's camp only has itself to blame. His advisers didn't seem to mind when Schwarzenegger's old pal Joe Weider apparently helped impose what Mickey Kaus calls an "embargo" on printing such allegations in a number of tabloids. If the tabloids had run with these articles earlier in the race, the mainstream press would have accelerated its own coverage, and Schwarzenegger would have had more time to push back against the stories and perhaps get past them.

--Nick Confessore

WAS IT ROVE? You (and a few other people in Washington) might have a huge hunch that Karl Rove was behind the Valerie Plame leak, but here's a guy who has an even bigger hunch -- and knows his subject. Rove biographer James Moore thinks that Rove is not only Bush's Brain (the title of his book on Rove, reviewed for the Prospect by E.J. Dionne here) but the man at the end of the Plame trail too. Here's Moore on MSNBC's Buchanan and Press yesterday, speaking to host Bill Press:

I'm saying that if Mr. Rove is not involved, Bill, I'll eat the paperback copy of my own book because this is a guy who controls everything, and he has a history of putting a layer of protection between himself and other people, using other operatives to get things done. This fits the perfect pattern that he has used in campaigns and elections in Texas and on the national scene for more than 20 years. It does not surprise those of us who have watched him operate.

And:

[A]fter having watched Mr. Rove for all of these years, I know full well, and anybody who knows the way he works, that something of this nature does not happen without Karl checking the yes box.

Moore also served up a nice reminder that, according to Ron Suskind, Rove was canned -- by the father of his current boss -- for leaking back in 1992.

--Heidi Pauken

IS THE VOTER ALWAYS RIGHT? The Washington Post continues to lead the pack in its Valerie Plame reporting. Today's installment is nicely upfront about acknowledging the political strategy of White House aides -- which, unfortunately, seems less about getting to the bottom of what happened than about spinning their way out of this mess.

Confronted with little public support for the White House view that the investigation should be handled by the Justice Department, Bush aides began yesterday to adjust their response to the expanding probe. They reined in earlier, broad portrayals of innocence in favor of more technical arguments that it is possible the disclosure was made without knowledge that a covert operative was being exposed and therefore might not have been a crime.

As the White House hunkered down, it got the first taste of criticism from within Bush's own party. Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.) said that Bush "needs to get this behind him" by taking a more active role. "He has that main responsibility to see this through and see it through quickly, and that would include, if I was president, sitting down with my vice president and asking what he knows about it," the outspoken Hagel said last night on CNBC's "Capital Report."

At the same time, administration allies outside the White House stepped up a counteroffensive that seeks to discredit the administration's main accuser, former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, whose wife was named as a CIA operative. Republican National Committee Chairman Ed Gillespie gave a string of television interviews with the three-part message that the Justice Department is investigating, that the White House is fully cooperating and that Wilson has a political agenda and has made "rash statements."

"He is someone, given his politics, who is obviously prone to think the worst of this White House," Gillespie said by telephone.

I don't know, Ed -- maybe the fact that you guys ruined his wife's career and possibly put her former colleagues in mortal danger has something to do with Wilson's feelings towards the White House. That's just a thought, though. (The New York Times has a nice quote from a Republican staffer on the Hill, who calls the White House strategy "slime and defend.")

I have a hard time believing the Plame leak was cooked up at a meeting -- it seems more likely that a couple of top officials cooked it up in the men's room and acted rashly out of the belief that they would never be caught or held accountable. That the White House would nevertheless circle the wagons is not surprising -- any administration would do the same, at least at first, no matter how in the wrong it was. But the fact that President Bush's inner circle would risk further damage to him over actions he probably had nothing to do with -- instead of hanging the culprit out to dry and moving on, which would be the smart thing to do -- suggests that whichever official is being protected is either too important to lose or is powerful enough in his own right to demand that he not be hung out to dry. That certainly reinforces scuttlebutt around Washington that a certain special advisor to the president is allegedly involved.

The Post article also talks about a poll that shows 81 percent of Americans saying alleged White House leaks are a serious matter, nearly 70 percent saying they want a special prosecutor appointed and 72 percent saying someone in the White House was likely responsible for the leaks. Frankly, I'm not sure what to make of those numbers. Americans are right to think this is a serious matter -- it is. The president's father would presumably agree. (George H.W. Bush considers those who blow our intelligence sources "the most insidious . . . of traitors." And who are we to argue with the former CIA director?) And perhaps a special prosecutor is warranted, though I have zero nostalgia for independent counsels, which, unlike special prosecutors, are thoroughly unaccountable to elected officials. (Here's Anthony Lewis' seminal Prospect essay on the independent counsel, circa 1998.) But I can't claim that the large number of people who are sure that someone in the White House is responsible makes me any more certain that this is the case. After all, a similar percentage of people think that Saddam Hussein had something to do with 9-11.

--Nick Confessore

UH, DIDN'T YOU MEAN TO SLUG THAT AS AN EDITORIAL? The New York Sun has posted a hilariously overwrought piece by Sun co-founder Ira Stoll -- listed for some reason here as a "staff reporter"; did he get demoted? -- that takes a wobbly swing at Wesley Clark. Basically, you have Stoll calling up the neocons at the Project for a New American Century, taking down their reaction to criticisms Clark made of PNAC in this interview with Josh Marshall, and then writing up the results.

What makes it all so funny is that Stoll tries to pull this off as a piece of news reporting, with all the conventions thereof existing side-by-side with loaded language and between-the-lines editorializing. I can't decide if it reads more like an Onion article or a piece in Workers World:

General Wesley Clark, the late entry into the race for the Democratic nomination for president, is making what critics called a "bizarre," "crackpot" attack on a small Washington policy organization and on a citizens group that helped America win the Cold War.

In a Tuesday interview with Joshua Micah Marshall posted yesterday on the Web site talkingpointsmemo.com, General Clark gave his evaluation of the Clinton presidency. He said that the Clinton administration, "in an odd replay of the Carter administration, found itself chained to the Iraqi policy -- promoted by the Project for a New American Century -- much the same way that in the Carter administration some of the same people formed the Committee on the Present Danger which cut out from the Carter administration the ability to move forward on SALT II."

The Project for a New American Century is a Washington-based nonprofit organization whose chairman is William Kristol and that advocates a "Reaganite" foreign policy of "military strength and moral clarity." The Committee on the Present Danger was a bipartisan group created to defeat the Salt II arms control agreement between America and the Soviet Union.

The comments are a departure from General Clark's statements so far during his two-week-old presidential campaign, which have been for the most part been vague and carefully stagemanaged. He's running strong in national polls, and a New York state poll released yesterday by Quinnipiac University showed General Clark leading the pack of declared Democratic candidates, with 18% support. The poll, of 454 registered Democratic voters, had a 4.6% margin of error.The poll showed General Clark beating President Bush in New York State, 48% to 41%. For that match-up, the poll included 1,201 New York State registered voters, with a 2.8% margin of error.

Relatively few American voters have even heard of the Project for a New American Century or remember the Committee on the Present Danger, so the flap is unlikely to sway many votes immediately. But if the interview contributes to a sense of General Clark as something of a loose cannon, that might have an effect on voters seeking a steady leader to guide the nation in the war against terrorism.

Yessir -- this sure is a blow to Clark's presidential campaign. What's next from the Sun: "Republican Press Secretary Believes Bush 'Strong, Capable Leader'"? "Rove Says Plame Scandal Will Only Make Democrats Look Mean"? "Dear Leader: 'We Have Always Been At War With Eurasia'"?

You know, back in the day, Stoll himself made a career out of finding these kinds of articles in other newspapers and assailing them for their alleged biases. Talk about projection.

--Nick Confessore

STANDARD QUESTIONS. One interesting thing to watch has been the reaction of conservative press outlets to the revelation of Valerie Plame's identity. The Washington Times moved itself off the reservation with a strongly worded editorial yesterday, while the National Review and The Wall Street Journal's editorial page have remained loyal to the GOP line. In the din of commentary that's been offered for the past couple of days, the silence of The Weekly Standard has been fairly remarkable, especially given that the magazine's Web site has found the time for hard-hitting coverage of things like restaurants with big plates.

Catherine Titus Lowe, who handles the Standard's PR, told me this morning that there would "probably" be an article in the next print issue; I'll be interested to see what they have to say. On the one hand, the magazine's editors have historically shown more willingness to criticize the administration than most of their peers, but on the other hand they're very closely tied to the anti-CIA neoconservative faction within the administration that was presumably responsible for the leak. One clue might be provided by frequent Standard contributor Max Boot's op-ed in the Los Angeles Times, where he argues that blowing Plame's cover, while bad, isn't really that big a deal and that the real scandal is the CIA's poor record in assessing Saddam Hussein's weapons program.

Well, for one thing, the agency probably wouldn't have overestimated Iraq's WMD capabilities if Dick Cheney and his cronies hadn't spent so much time at Langley leaning on them to overestimate Iraq's WMD capabilities. For another thing, if this leak really isn't a big deal then why is the White House trying so hard to keep the truth under wraps? The president, after all, could have started this investigation months ago when the Novak column was first published. Instead the White House sat on it, waiting until someone leaked enough tantalizing information to The Washington Post to get the story on the front page, and Bush still hasn't taken the elementary step of asking his staff who was responsible. Hopefully Bill Kristol will come up with something better than Boot.

--Matthew Yglesias

SANTORUM RETURNS. When we last heard from Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Penn.), he had some pretty stupid things to say about gays. Now he has some pretty stupid things to say about senators who are opposing district court nominee and devout Catholic J. Leon Holmes. Holmes is facing resistance from both Republicans and Democrats because in 1997 he wrote that the duty of a wife is "to subordinate herself to her husband." Holmes has also compared abortion to slavery (a view that Santorum shares) and has said that rape victims rarely become pregnant. But Santorum is contending that opposition to Holmes flows not from queasiness over these statements, but from anti-Catholic "bigotry."

So let's get this straight: Now we can't have a legitimate debate over whether someone who believes that wives should be subordinate to husbands is a good candidate for the bench -- because weighing such questions is potentially anti-Catholic and bigoted? Talk about speech codes.

And shame on Democratic senators Mark Pryor and Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas for backing Holmes.

--Thomas Lang

HIDE AND SEEK. Looks like the White House wants to appropriate another $600 million to David Kay's so-far fruitless search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Maybe he ought to head over to North Korea where Kim Jong Il says he's reprocessed 8,000 fuel rods and is using the plutonium to make atomic bombs. It's possible, of course, that the North Koreans are lying about this, but they certainly seem to have some sort of nuclear program over there that we're going to need to deal with.

-- Matthew Yglesias

THE GOP AND THE MILITARY. It's well-known among military wonks that in recent decades our armed forces -- especially officers -- have tended to vote Republican. That trend accelerated enormously during the 1990s, in large part due to Bill Clinton's singularly bad relationship with the Pentagon. But if you follow this stuff, you know that many within the ranks who expected President Bush to be a strong advocate for soldiers have been disappointed; on issues like "concurrent receipts" (click here for an explanation), for instance, Bush has not been markedly more receptive to the Pentagon than his predecessor. And more recently, the Iraq War has placed enormous strains on enlisted men and women and reservists, all of whom are facing deployments that are longer and more strenuous than at any time in recent history.

Salon's Eric Boehlert has a great article today explaining some of the background here and exploring what effect the Bush administration's policies will have on the bond between the military and the GOP:

Today's list of military complaints is long: Many fighting men and women are upset over how the war in Iraq has been conducted (i.e. trying to prosecute the war "on the cheap"); feel that forces are being stretched too thinly; think that Pentagon civilian planners are not listening to generals; worry that part-time National Guard and reservists are being asked to carry too much of a burden; and find the administration's rationale for the war slippery. They also seem to have a visceral dislike for Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who's seen as having a vendetta against the Army, and think the Bush White House seems eager to send troops off to war yet reluctant to help Congress pass more comprehensive health benefits for disabled veterans.

During a 1999 campaign speech at the Citadel military school in South Carolina, Bush complained that under President Clinton, military "resources are over-stretched. Frustration is up, as families are separated and strained. Morale is down. This administration wants things both ways: To command great forces, without supporting them. To launch today's new causes, with little thought of tomorrow's consequences."

Today, those critiques strangely mirror the precise complaints being leveled against the Bush White House by some within the military. Veterans groups, for instance, are furious that the White House is blocking legislation that would help ease the burden of medical bills for 670,000 disabled vets. The Pentagon says it cannot afford the $5 billion-a-year budget buster and has recommended a presidential veto.

Vets fume when they contrast that belt-tightening talk against Bush's request to Congress for $87 billion to secure and rebuild Iraq, a number that's sure to escalate in the coming years. The former G.I.'s have even launched an online campaign, dubbed "Out the Door in 2004," targeting politicians who stand in the way of the bill's passage. Chief among those politicians is Bush.

The veterans bill remains bottled up in Republican committees -- and in a strange role reversal, it's the Democrats wearing the white hats in this Capitol Hill showdown over the military. Democrats are collecting congressional signatures for a "discharge petition" in an effort to the get the benefits bill to the floor for a vote where it would certainly pass in an up-or-down roll call. The Republican leadership, though, has forbidden its members from signing the petition despite the fact more than 100 of them cosponsored the bill.

Drawing even more ire today is the stretched-too-thinly troop rotation schedule for Iraq, exacerbated by the administration's inability to get additional allies to send soldiers to ease the burden on the U.S. That failure has placed extraordinary strains on young families in America, especially for National Guard members and reservists, some of whom, instead of being called up for five days of local flood duties, are being lifted out of their communities and jobs for more than a year at a time to serve in Iraq.

Adding to the drip-drip frustration was a trial balloon floated this summer by the Pentagon to cut hazardous pay for soldiers in Iraq. Also, some G.I.'s recovering from battle wounds were getting billed for their hospital meals.

Personally, I doubt huge numbers of soldiers are going to start voting for Howard Dean any time soon. But in the long term, it would be good for the health of civilian-military relations if the active-duty military decoupled itself from partisan politics and returned to the earlier, pre-Vietnam tradition of remaining apolitical.

-- Nick Confessore

SO LONG, SUCKER. I'm sure Mrs. Shapiro, assuming she's alive and of sound mind as we all hope, is proud of her boy Mark for having risen up to become an executive vice president at ESPN. But I wonder how proud she's been over the previous week, during which Shapiro has disgraced himself and his network by mounting those lame and disingenuous defenses of Rush Limbaugh, the now blessedly former commentator on the otherwise excellent and once again watchable NFL Game Day. When the story first started to mount legs on Tuesday -- and when it was obvious to anyone with a working brain that Limbaugh had injected bellicose political opinion into a football show by saying Eagles QB Donovan McNabb was overrated in part because he was black -- Mrs. Shapiro's son was praising Limbaugh: "We brought Rush in for no-holds-barred opinion," he said. "Early on, he has delivered."

Nice.

One can only hope that behind the scenes, Chris Berman and Tom Jackson, the mainstays of the show, were telling Shapiro what they really thought. Yes, Berman toed the line publicly, but the fact that he felt behooved to announce to the world that he's a "New England Democrat" (I knew it!) represented, I'd like to think, a subtle attempt to wink to us Democratic gridiron fans that we had a mole in Bristol.

Meanwhile, kudos to the sportswriters who wrote about this and kept the pressure on the feckless Shapiro. USA Today's Rudy Martzke penned a tough piece. Ditto Stephen Smith of The Philadelphia Inquirer and Smith's colleague Phil Sheridan, who started this ball rolling with a smoking Sept. 30 column. Funny thing -- "serious" political journalists like Tim Russert and Howard Kurtz have been mainstreaming Limbaugh over the previous year, gingerly placing the laurel of credibility around his polluted head. It took sportswriters to tell the truth.

--Michael Tomasky

BYLINES FOR TAPPED. Starting today, Tapped posts will carry the bylines of those who write them. In part this is designed to accommodate different viewpoints within the Tapped family -- which we hope will include a growing number of the Prospect's staffers and contributors -- and in part to allow us to carry on debates with each other in ways that weren't possible when we all wrote under a collective pseudonym.

We hope this change will make Tapped more lively than it has ever been. Readers may have noticed that we've more than doubled our number of posts in the last few months. With the switch to bylines, we hope the types of posts we do will also expand, as writers inject their own voices into the blog.

The basic concepts behind Tapped will stay the same. For one thing, our posts will still be centrally edited. For another, one of our favorite parts of blogging will still be corresponding with our readers. So keep your comments coming to tapped@prospect.org, and put the name of your intended recipient in the subject line.

--Richard Just
Editor, TAP Online

LABOR DEMURS. The AFL-CIO has declined to give Dick Gephardt an early primary endorsement, setting Gephardt back -- but probably doing labor, and the eventual Democratic nominee, a favor. As Prospect senior correspondent John Judis explained in this article:

In 1984, the AFL-CIO endorsed former Vice President Walter Mondale in a multi-candidate field very similar to the current one. The three leading Democrats running that year--Mondale, Ohio Senator John Glenn and Colorado Senator Gary Hart--had strong pro-labor voting records, and, if elected, would have been far more friendly to the AFL-CIO than Ronald Reagan. But the union presidents thought Mondale was best on their issues. They also liked the idea that, if elected, he would owe his nomination to labor.

The endorsement strategy backfired. During the primary, Hart and Glenn attacked Mondale as the candidate of "special interests"--a reference to the AFL-CIO's endorsement--while reporters demanded to know on what issues, if any, Mondale differed from his labor patrons. By the time the general election rolled around, Mondale had long since been typecast as "labor's candidate"--which hurt him among suburban swing voters. Before long, Mondale was trying to move to the center by calling for tax increases to reduce the deficit, but that only deepened his plight: It allowed Reagan to capture the center (as the candidate for all Americans) while appealing to working class voters with his tax-cut populism. Mondale would have lost anyway, but the AFL-CIO's primary endorsement ensured that he lost big.

Seems like it's best for labor to avoid getting into the primary fight.

WAS GEN. CLARK A REPUBLICAN? The preponderance of evidence emerging seems to argue that, no, he wasn't. He was and, according to Businessweek, remains, even now, a registered independent with close ties to both sides of the aisle. But Tapped has learned that Clark's only major personal political donation was to a Democrat. According to Federal Election Commission records, Wesley K. Clark donated $1,000 to the campaign of former Clinton aide Erskine Bowles on Nov. 4, 2002. Now, that doesn't settle the question of whether or not Clark has adequate political savvy to be president. After all, that money would probably have made much more of a difference if Bowles had received it earlier than, say, the day before he lost the North Carolina Senate race to Elizabeth Dole.

THE BEST DEFENSE. Just when we were wondering where all the principled conservatives had gone, Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.) displays some of the high-minded non-partisanship we've come to expect from the House GOP. Here's his take on Wilsongate:

Representative Peter T. King of Long Island said the controversy "shouldn't have legs" but expressed concern that political damage had already been done. "Over all, politically, I think the White House has to go on the offense," Mr. King said.

Wow. So far folks across the ideological spectrum have at least felt it was necessary to pretend they wanted to get to the bottom of this situation. At least the good people of Long Island know where their elected officials stand.

HISTORY A LA FRUM. Last time we caught David Frum getting his history wrong we held out hope that he'd do better if he turned his gaze to his native Canada. Today, however, we were disappointed to read his description of Canada as a "society uncursed by slavery." It's true that slavery was never as big up north as it was in the States but there were indeed Canadian slaves until the early decades of the 19th century. Read about them here and about Canada's anti-slavery movement here.

DEAN'S APPEAL. This Washington Post article, by Laura Blumenfeld, is one of the best explanations Tapped has yet seen of Howard Dean's appeal. Blumenfeld doesn't fall for the tired CW propounded by Republicans and some of Dean's fellow contenders -- that his "rage" attracts equally enraged liberal activists. Nor does she seem to have a particular agenda, save to suss out what's happening on the ground out there. The result is a nicely turned piece that gets beyond horse-race campaign journalism and gives readers a real sense of how Dean interacts with people. Bravo for the Post.

IF IT'S GOOD ENOUGH FOR AFRICA . . . Republican Sen. Lamar Alexander of Tennessee has some good advice in The Washington Times on how to fight AIDS in Africa. Our only real question is, if promoting the use condoms has helped prevent a sexually transmitted disease in Uganda, why wouldn't it work here in America? Perhaps Alexander could send a copy of his op-ed to the White House.

PLAME ROUNDUP. The Washington Post reports on the Justice Department's decision yesterday to open up a criminal investigation of the Valerie Plame leak -- an investigation that could lead to the appointment of a special counsel, for which the Democrats have already asked. President Bush tried to move the goalposts in his Chicago speech, available here, by proclaiming his opposition to leaks in general: "We've had leaks out of the administrative branch, had leaks out of the legislative branch, and out of the executive branch and the legislative branch, and I've spoken out consistently against them and I want to know who the leakers are." Uh, sure, but that wasn't the question, Mr. President. Talking Points (here) and Atrios (here) argue that the White House is looking to pull something of a judo move, using the leaks controversy to wage war on CIA analysts who may be tempted to talk to the press about the administration's misuse of intelligence data. Robert Novak non-addresses the controversy in his latest column, spinning madly -- it reads like a press release from Scott McClellan, leaves out relevant information and contradicts information confirmed in other news outlets. (He writes, "The published report that somebody in the White House failed to plant this story with six reporters and finally found me as a willing pawn is simply untrue." As when a politician precedes a statement with "frankly," beware when a pundit says something is "simply untrue.") Via CalPundit, here's a Republican former intelligence official who, to his credit, is sickened by the whole affair. And yes, it is surprising that Chris Matthews got Ed Gillespie -- the Republican chairman and a hardened, talking-points-spouting hack if there ever was one -- to concede that the Plame affair could be as big as Watergate.

Meanwhile, The Wall Street Journal thinks this whole endangering-undercover-CIA-agents-thing is no big deal. (What if we told them that a semi-sane lowlife believed Bush was running drugs out of a small airport in Arkansas? Maybe that would be a story!)

WHAT ABOUT BOB? With all this talk of a big investigation by the FBI into the Valerie Plame matter, it's worth noting that the whole mystery could be resolved pretty quickly by simply issuing a subpoena to Robert Novak and asking him to name his sources for the July 14 column. First amendment law expert Eugene Volokh says such an order would be constitutional, citing the case of Branzburg v. Hayes. This wouldn't be the most journalist-friendly resolution of the situation, but it's got to be a tempting one for the Bush administration, since it would negate the need for investigators to crawl all over the West Wing for an extended period of time. Besides, when has the Bush administration cared about being journalist-friendly?