Saturday, 04 December 2004

Double take. Now here's something you don't see in Australia every day:

I saw one of these on a car last night about a block from my house. Aussies don't really go for the window decal with the name of your alma mater on it, so it's unusual to see one at all — much less one from where I got my bachelor's degree, way back when. I spoke to the driver and he was a graduate of the UIUC class of '99; he sounded Australian, but said he was going back to the USA (I think he said to Washington University in St. Louis) for his doctorate next year.

Small world, I guess.

- Posted by Scott Forbes at 6:18 am. comments.

Tuesday, 23 November 2004

Post mortem. I said my peace about the election results in another forum — and, indeed, a lot of the time and energy I would have spent blogging these past few months was given over to Democrats Abroad instead. The election was a disappointment, to say the least, and perhaps more so because it was so close: Not as close as 2000, but close enough that you could point to almost any one thing and say that it could have changed the outcome. Should Kerry have spent more money in Missouri and Arkansas, and kept less in reserve for post-election legal battles? Should he have hit back harder and faster against the Swift Boat liars? Should he have done more to keep Bush on the defensive?

Well, yes, yes and yes. But Monday- (or Wednesday-) morning quarterbacking is always easier than playing the game, and John Kerry certainly gave Bush a run for his $200 million. I think history will look back on Bush's term in office, and perhaps the decade, as an era of lost opportunities — a time when a greater, more visionary President could have united America as never before, when we could have really struck a blow for freedom and democracy in the Mideast, and when we could have avoided a financial meltdown which any economist worth his salt can see coming… but didn't.

I've read a few analyses of the poll results, and the one that had me nodding my head the most was about the difference between pathos (an appeal to emotion) and logos (an appeal to the mind). John Kerry, and Al Gore before him, were candidates who appealed on an intellectual level: They appealed to voters who made a rational decision, based on logic and issues and results. George W. Bush, and Bill Clinton before him, made a stronger appeal to emotion — to people who voted their gut instincts and chose the more "likeable" candidate, although both Clinton and Bush inspired irrational hatreds. And the pattern for the past thirty years (at least) has been in favor of charisma over competence.

I liked Howard Dean in the primaries in part because he was a budget-balancing centrist, in part because he was clearly going to put Bush on the defensive, and in part because I genuinely liked Dean. He was bold. He took risks. He wasn't a typical politician. Kerry was a typical politician, albeit one with an interesting backstory, and like many I warmed to him over time more than I was fired up by him initially. I think the Democratic grassroots nearly forced Kerry to take John Edwards as a running mate, if only to give him a boost in the charisma department; I can only imagine a Kerry-Gephardt or Kerry-Vilsack ticket doing worse, even if that choice brought Missouri or Iowa into the fold. The enthusiasm wouldn't have been there.

But I do think this election was a watershed in other ways. The Republicans never stopped campaigning after the 1992 election — they just switched from attacking the Democratic candidates to attacking the Democratic incumbents — and I think this year the Democrats will finally start catching up. Planning for 2006 starts in 2004, and hundreds of thousands of Democrats now have experience with organizing, speaking, campaigning and other skills that will come into play two years from now. In two years we'll have a strategy for countering the GOP's attacks on our values and our religion, and for pointing out their hypocrisy. We're gradually getting better at making our voices heard over the noise of the right-wing hate machine, and at learning how the GOP frames its message to deceive the audience. We're not going to adopt the tools of the enemy, but we're going to learn how to defeat them.

I'm not optimistic about four more years of the Bush administration, especially with Powell leaving, Rice taking his place (ye gods, was the captain of the Exxon Valdez not available?), with the father of Abu Ghraib moving over to the Attorney General's office, and don't even get me started about Rumsfeld — but if the nation survived six years of Richard Nixon, it can survive until 2006 with George W. Bush in charge.

I do have to admit I'm feeling good about earning my salary in a foreign currency, though. Four more years of Bush's borrow-and-spend policies will leave a smoking crater where the Treasury used to be.

- Posted by Scott Forbes at 12:37 pm. comments.

Friday, 05 November 2004

Words of wisdom.

"A little patience, and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their spells dissolve, and the people, recovering their true sight, restore their government to its true principles. It is true that in the meantime we are suffering deeply in spirit, and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public debt......If the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at stake."

— Thomas Jefferson, 1798, after the passage of the Sedition Act.

- Posted by Scott Forbes at 1:33 pm. comments.

Thursday, 28 October 2004

Access denied. BBC News and Boing Boing report, and I have confirmed, that the Bush campaign's official web site is no longer accessible from overseas. Overseas Americans who try to visit Bush's page now get the message "You are not authorized to access www.GeorgeWBush.com."

We're not authorized to access George W. Bush. That's sort of been the problem all along, hasn't it?

- Posted by Scott Forbes at 12:29 am. comments.

Wednesday, 27 October 2004

Hey mister deejay: So, what did you do after work last night? Watch a little TV? Go out to dinner? Catch up on some reading?

That's nice. I helped raise over $5,000 for John Kerry.

For reasons best explained as "have iBook, will travel," I spent yesterday evening in the audio/video booth at our Democrats Abroad Sydney fundraiser — where we had about 120 (!) Kerry supporters show up to cheer our candidate on to victory. (Our previous attendance record was somewhere around 45 people, so this was a big, big night; the people at Bar Broadway, who've been incredibly supportive as we commandeer their upstairs function room once a week, said we should do this more often.)

Here's Tanya Plibersek, a Member of Parliament and of the Australian Labor Party, speaking about the importance of the upcoming American election and its effect on U.S.-Australia relations — but, more importantly, I'm supplying the Kerry/Edwards logo in the background! Doesn't it look great.

Crowd scene! I'd guess this was taken around 7:30 or so, when there were about 50 or 60 people; the room was even more packed an hour later. Bar Broadway took phone calls all day from people asking for directions, which they said only happens on major events.

Here's me doing a song and dance number — no, actually this is me talking about the current state-by-state polls, what Kerry needs in order to win, and why he's going to. Incumbents, challengers, undecideds, two-to-one ratios, getting out the vote, and it all adds up to Kerry 300, Bush 238. The October surprise is that Democrats are registering to vote in record numbers.

By the end of the night the Kerry campaign was over $5,000 richer, courtesy of donations large and small: From $500 checks to $5 bills, Kerry supporters in Australia showed their support with money, enthusiasm… and with the thousands of absentee ballots they've already mailed in.

(Thanks to Greg for taking the photos. Next week we have the all-day victory party on Wednesday; the returns will start coming in around 11am our time, so we'll be partying for ten hours straight at least.)

- Posted by Scott Forbes at 12:45 pm. comments.

Tuesday, 12 October 2004

Meanwhile, back in Oz… Australia's main conservative party, which in an ironic twist is named the Liberals, wins re-election in a race expected to be closer than it was. This election was a referendum on the Bush Administration in the same sense that the race between John Kerry and George Bush is about stem cell research: It's an issue, but it wasn't the deciding issue. Most Australians appear to have voted with their pocketbooks — the Howard government is doing a much better job of managing Oz's economy than some political parties I might name — with logging in Tasmania providing an interesting side issue.

As he has all along, Tim Dunlop's Road to Surfdom has a good summary of the Oz elections and what they mean going forward.

- Posted by Scott Forbes at 4:49 am. comments.

Thursday, 07 October 2004

The boy who cried WMDs: George W. Bush fails the global test.

- Posted by Scott Forbes at 10:18 pm. comments.

Wednesday, 06 October 2004

Two good men. A passing salute to Pennsylvania's John Murtha and California's Pete Stark — the only two members of the House to vote in favor of reinstating the draft. I don't support the idea of a draft myself; I think we need to expand the military, but I'd like to see it done by calling for more volunteers. But I do admire Murtha and Stark for the courage of their convictions, and I wish the GOP-controlled House would take its duties more seriously.

- Posted by Scott Forbes at 1:44 pm. comments.

Wednesday, 06 October 2004

No, John Edwards. I am your father. I've only watched part of the vice-presidential debate — I simply can't watch Dick Cheney speak without stopping the tape and fact-checking him. (Cheney says Afghanistan will have its first-ever election in four days… hmm… nope. Afghanistan's first election was in 1965.) But I think the best summary I've read so far is that, out of the four candidates, Bush is now in fourth place.

- Posted by Scott Forbes at 11:56 am. comments.

Monday, 04 October 2004

Winning the spin: In 2000, the initial polls showed that Al Gore won his first debate against George W. Bush — but the GOP waged a very effective campaign to change that outcome. They shifted the focus away from the substance of the debate, and relentlessly hammered away at Gore's mannerisms. He sighed. He "wasn't comfortable in his own skin." Never mind the debate itself: Bush won the game of low expectations, and packaged himself as the candidate you'd rather have a beer with.

In 2004, Bush is losing both the debate and the post-game spin: Kerry's team did a masterful job of setting expectations, playing a briar-patch game with the flashing red light on the podium — it turns out Kerry's speaking skills improve when he's limited to two minutes, while Bush does worse when he's forced to fill two minutes — and so far the Bush campaign's early attempts to shift the focus are failing. The Kerry campaign and their surrogates are keeping the Bushistas on their back feet; witness this exchange, for example, to see who's getting the better of whom.

The Cheney-Edwards debate will be a crowd-pleaser, but we've already seen that even a knock-out punch against a VP candidate will not move the polls very much. Lloyd Bentsen annihilated Dan Quayle in the '88 vice-presidential debate, with the line that all but ended Quayle's career: "Senator, you're no Jack Kennedy." But the senior Bush rode Reagan's coat-tails to victory, unlike Gore in 2000 — and Mike Dukakis did not look presidential on the campaign trail, where Kerry is looking more and more like the 44th President of the United States.

So the road to the White House now runs through the second presidential debate, the one with the town-hall format in St. Louis — and Bush's guilty secret is that he only won the 2000 town-hall debate because Gore did even worse. Bush is a walking disaster without a script, and the town-hall debates are known for throwing the most curveballs: The candidates could predict and prepare for the questions Jim Lehrer asked, but in a town-hall debate the topics could be anything from ethanol subsidies to Venezuela. If you thought Bush looked like a deer in the headlights last week, St. Louis should give him even more of a challenge — and Kerry doesn't even have to set expectations, because Bush can't afford to lose two consecutive debates.

- Posted by Scott Forbes at 2:27 am. comments.

Sunday, 03 October 2004

The only thing we have to fear is… …the GOP trying to scare up some votes. Given Bush's debate performance, I'd say we're due for a Code Orange soon.

- Posted by Scott Forbes at 2:42 am. comments.

Saturday, 02 October 2004

The debate. Time zones being what they are, the first Presidential debate aired at 11am on Friday down here; I didn't get to watch it until the following day, although I did manage to read a lot of the post-debate spin first.

Overall impressions: Kerry spent 90 minutes on the attack without looking aggressive, which is hard to pull off; he stumbled a bit on the question about preemptive war (the one where Kerry talked about passing the "global test"), but otherwise he was calm, cool, collected, and kept Bush on the defensive all night. If you only listened to Kerry at this debate, it would be hard to figure out where his reputation for long elliptical sentences came from: He didn't deliver a knockout sound bite — no "you're no Jack Kennedy" — but he scored some solid punches with "you can be certain and be wrong" and about outsourcing the job of capturing Osama.

Meanwhile, in the other corner… I'm biased against Bush, but I really suspect he and his campaign got cocky going into this: They started to believe their own spin, that their exaggerated caricature of John Kerry was the real Kerry, and as a result Bush got knocked off his game in the opening seconds. The plan was that Bush would get up there, do his aw-shucks "I'm just plain folks" routine, repeat a handful of sound bites meant to sow doubts about Kerry, and Kerry would cooperate by being all college professor-y and maybe do a few of those flip-flops Bush keeps talking about right there on stage. The plan was not for Kerry to look and sound more presidential than the President, for Kerry to turn one of Bush's favorite attack lines back on him — when Bush mentioned Kerry's "voted for it before I voted against it" gaffe, Kerry was ready; he pounced on it immediately — or for Bush to run out of talking points and start repeating himself.

This debate was supposed to be Bush's strong suit, the one where people walked away reassured about Bush's steady hand and doubtful about Kerry's ability to lead. Instead, Kerry zeroed in on Bush's weak points — Osama and peacekeeping — and impressed viewers by sounding confident and strong. Bush came off second best, sounded petulant and defensive, and gave Kerry several more sticks to beat him with: "You forgot Poland," "of course I know Osama bin Laden attacked us," and Bush's repeated complaint that it's "hard work" being President are going to be next week's talking points.

For me, the highlight of the debate was this exchange:

LEHRER: New question, two minutes, Senator Kerry.

If you are elected president, what will you take to that office thinking is the single most serious threat to the national security to the United States?

ME, playing along at home: Nuclear proliferation! Say it! Say it say it sayitsayitsayitsayit—

KERRY: Nuclear proliferation.

ME: YES!

Kerry sounded far and away like the more serious candidate about stopping the spread of nuclear weapons — which admittedly isn't hard to do when standing next to George W. Bush, but nonetheless. Bush's rebuttal on this one was especially weak, saying that proliferation "is one of the centerpieces of a multi-prong strategy," claiming that he'd "busted the A.Q. Khan network" (we caught a man selling nukes on the black market, let him off with an apology and a promise to Never Do It Again, and in Bush's universe this counts as a bust?!) and then somehow turning the rest of his answer into a plug for missile defense systems. I know who I'd rather have in charge.

- Posted by Scott Forbes at 9:53 am. comments.

Thursday, 30 September 2004

Don't know whether to laugh or cry? Fafblog weighs in on the question of whether America should legalize the practice of "extraordinary rendition" — that is, on whether we should tear up the Bill of Rights and just start torturing people. Dennis Hastert says yes, Fafblog says… well, read for yourself.

On a related note, the Onion reports on startling new findings about Bush's service records.

- Posted by Scott Forbes at 10:47 am. comments.

Wednesday, 29 September 2004

The Presidential Debate Drinking Game. EQUIPMENT REQUIRED: An American flag, a $1 bill, you, your friends, and plenty of drinks.

Every time Bush says…	You…
"nu-kyu-lar"	smack your forehead and take 1 drink
"Iraq" or "Saddam"	shout "yee-hah!" and take 1 drink
"weapons of mass destruction"	look for them under the table — if you don't find any, take 1 drink
"terror" or "terrorists"	scream in terror and take 1 drink
"America is safer"	cough the word "bullsh*t" and take 1 drink
"tax cuts"	buy another round and put it on your credit card
"Dick Cheney"	sing "Hail to the Chief" and take 2 drinks
"North Korea" or "Iran"	shout "you're next!" and take 1 drink
"September 11th"	wrap yourself in the flag and take 2 drinks
blames Congress or Clinton	pass the buck one person to the right
admits a mistake	duck to avoid the flying pigs

 

Every time Kerry says...	You...
"Osama bin Laden"	look around the room — if you find him, tell Bush where he is; if not, take 1 drink
"two Americas"	sing "This Land is Your Land" and take 2 drinks
"unilateral"	whoever has the $1 bill takes a drink
"allies" or "NATO"	shake hands with someone and take 1 drink
"Vietnam"	salute "reporting for duty!" and take 1 drink
"wealthiest one percent"	buy another round and pay for it in cash
"outsourcing"	buy a round of foreign beers
hints or says Bush is not telling the truth	gasp "noo!" in shock and take 1 drink
"health care"	check your pulse and take 1 drink
"John Edwards"	swoon or cheer (your choice) and take 2 drinks
"America can do better"	wave the flag and take 1 drink

- Posted by Scott Forbes at 12:37 pm. comments.

Sunday, 26 September 2004

Meanwhile, back in the Sixties… Weezil, another American blogging from Down Under (One of us! One of us! One of us!), notes a new video game coming soon:

Move over Lara Croft. Say hello to Lt. John Kerry, action video game hero.

Later this month the presidential candidate's service in Vietnam — the subject of ongoing controversy — receives the full video game treatment with "John Kerry and the men of Swift Boat PCF-94."

Available for download from kumawar.com as a free seven-day trial, the game will put players in the combat boots of a 25-year-old Lt. Kerry on Feb. 28, 1969, the date he earned his Silver Star citation.

I think the game based on Bush's record will continue to be more popular, though.

- Posted by Scott Forbes at 11:32 am. comments.

Friday, 17 September 2004

The Two Iraqs. Part of the art of running for President is coming up with sound bites — short, memorable phrases that define your campaign or your opponent. Of all the Democratic candidates, John Edwards and his "two Americas" stump speech produced the best and most effective message of the primaries. Dick Gephardt's "miserable failure" was more pointed, and Howard Dean's "I want my country back!" was more passionate… but Edwards took a complex issue — the widening gap between rich and poor in America, and its impact on our society — and found a two-word phrase to express it. Talking about the "shrinking middle class" doesn't catch the audience's attention; talking about Two Americas, one for the wealthy and one for the rest of us, does.

John Kerry needs a sound bite to describe our situation in Iraq right now. It can't be the plain and simple truth — that Bush's colossal series of mistakes are costing us the peace — because Bush will respond by blowing sunshine, portraying himself as the optimistic candidate, and doing everything possible to plant positive Iraq stories in sympathetic media outlets. No, the sound bite needs to capture the truth about the war and take note of Bush's duplicity; it needs to shine a light on both Bush's distorted message on Iraq and the actual message that's coming from the country.

Kerry needs to start talking about the Two Iraqs.

In Bush's Iraq, it's all rainbows and flowers: The schools are being painted, the country is on its way to democracy, Saddam is locked up, and we're killing more evil-doers than you can count. It's hard work, says Bush, but we're proud of our troops and the job they've done.

In the other Iraq, we're on the brink of a civil war. Coalition forces can't even guarantee security in the Green Zone, much less provide law and order outside the gates; the Iraqi people live in a constant state of danger, and fear the foreign troops in their country as bringers of death and destruction.

Bush's Iraq may sound more pleasant, but self-delusion has no place in the Oval Office — and Bush's Two Iraqs contain one self-delusion after another. In Bush's imaginary Iraq, Saddam had WMDs on the launch pad. In Bush's imaginary Iraq, he was within a year of having nukes; and in Bush's imaginary Iraq, Saddam was working hand-in-hand with Osama. In the real Iraq, Saddam was a tyrant and a murderer — but he wasn't responsible for September 11th, and the threat he posed to American interests was far less urgent than the threat we face from Osama bin Laden.

Today, no matter what really happens, things are going well in Bush's Iraq. And things will keep going well in Bush's Iraq, no matter how many of our young soldiers are quietly brought home in coffins, or disabled for life by crippling wounds. It's an open-ended mission that will always be accomplished — always — because that's what George Bush wants you to hear.

John Kerry and John Edwards will put an end to the Two Iraqs, and level with the American people about what needs to be done to stabilize Iraq and bring an end to the occupation. America must be made stronger and safer against the terrorist threat that we faced on September 11th — but there is no safety in retreating to Bush's dream world, where Iraq is at peace and America is safer because that's the way we wished it would be.

America can do better.

- Posted by Scott Forbes at 5:05 am. comments.

Thursday, 16 September 2004

Fair and balanced, part II: Okay, now I have more right-of-center reading material than I know what to do with, in part thanks to Donald Sensing and his readers. Here are the blogs that people suggested to balance out my reading list, along with my first impressions of each:

• Andrew Sullivan's Daily Dish. I've read it before, and if I had to sum it up: The main topic of Andrew Sullivan's blog is… Andrew Sullivan. It's a great source for learning what Andrew Sullivan thinks on the issues, what Andrew Sullivan is watching and reading, and various other Andrew Sullivan-related things, but beyond that it doesn't offer much substance. Not that the entire blogosphere doesn't give new meaning to the term "vanity press," but I think he saves his better prose for TIME or The New Republic.
• Sgt. Stryker's Daily Briefing. As Sean pointed out, the namesake Sergeant isn't blogging much these days; I liked Kevin Connors' article on the Nature Conservancy, even if I didn't fully agree with the sentiment, and was impressed by the link to TalkLeft showing bipartisan concern about our shrinking Fourth Amendment rights. I found I was skimming the majority of the articles here, though, so this may not be my cup of joe.
• Belmont Club. Very solid blog with a lot of original content; I was surprised to find myself mentioned in one of the articles, and Wretchard is one of the rare few on the right who can talk about Dan Rather without spraying spittle all over the monitor. Definitely high on the list.
• Winds of Change. Some good posts about assault weapons, nation-building in Iraq, and a very meaty article on alternative energy sources, which was one of Steven Den Beste's pet topics. More substance and variety than most right-wing blogs.
• Daily Pundit. Lost me with the first article, and went downhill from there. No thanks.
• Roger L. Simon. CBS, CBS, CBS, CBS, CBS, CBS, CBS, CBS, CBS, CBS, CBS, CBS… I lost interest at this point. Actually I lost interest somewhere around the fifth article, but kept going because I figured it would end soon. It didn't. This may be a bad week for sampling right-wing blogs, but anyone this fanatical about one topic is probably not going to hold my attention.
• EuroPundits. I like the international flavor, what with being overseas myself; the main (only?) contributor appears to be from Brazil. I'm not sure I have the attention span for the long, dense articles, though: I found myself scrolling to the bottom of each one to see how long it would take to read. (Insert your own joke about Steven Den Beste's writing here.)
• Michael Totten. Good writing, interesting perspective, but too centrist for this exercise. I might add him to my blogroll anyway, though.
• Diogenes Corner. A new blog with four articles so far, one of which is his introduction; another combines a touching story of involuntary medical discharge with some fairly low blows aimed at Josh Marshall and others. I can tolerate someone who says the left is wrong, but "stomping on the dreams of those they claim to care about" is too much malice for my tastes. (Not that searching this blog's archives wouldn't find me guilty of worse, I suspect.)
• Hugh Hewitt. …is calling for Congress to investigate CBS. Next!
• The other recommendation was for Daniel Drezner, but he's already on my reading list — I consider him one of the best-informed writers about economic issues in the entire blogosphere, and politically one of the least partisan bloggers out there. Besides, any blog with articles on the Foreign Direct Investment of Hooters is okay in my book.

If I had to choose today, it's between Belmont Club and Winds of Change. Of course the second prize in this contest should be two links in my blogroll, and there's no rule that says I can't start reading more than one new blog — except for the limits on my available time, which are unfortunately vast and numerous.

Nonetheless, this has been a fun and interesting exercise to expand my reading horizons. Thanks again to everyone who offered a suggestion; it's good to know there's a variety of non-rabid right-wing blogs to choose from.

- Posted by Scott Forbes at 10:19 am. comments.

Sunday, 12 September 2004

Fair and balanced. Now that the USS Clueless has gone offline with some sort of warp core breach, my blogroll is skewing too far to the left. I try to at least maintain some degree of even-handedness in my online reading, if only to keep from falling into groupthink — and I find it rewarding to read thoughtful challenges to many of the opinions I hold.

Steven Den Beste will never be accused of brevity, and his articles often brought new meaning to the phrase "going off on a tangent" — but sometimes he came back from the deep end with an interesting analogy or a thought-provoking metaphor. He also kept one foot in reality and understood the difference between fact and opinion, which is a distressingly rare trait these days among people I disagree with.

(It's a problem for some people I agree with, too… but not as frequently. I made the observation the other day that most right-wingers go from "I want to believe X is true" to "X has been proven" without even taking any intermediate steps; Jeanne d'Arc said the same thing, but much more eloquently, here.)

So with Steven on hiatus, I'm shopping around for some insightful right-of-center blogging to wrestle with in his absence — and I'm having trouble finding a blog that fits the bill. I suspect part of my problem is that we're close to the election, which is driving many bloggers deeper into their respective camps; blogs like One Hand Clapping are more openly partisan than they were a year ago, and the right-of-center ground has emptied out.

So, I'll make this appeal to all five of my readers — help me find a blog that will balance out my reading list. A few criteria:

• I'm not a masochist, so right-wing blogs that are hostile, condescending, insulting, or insane are off the list. (I realize that right-wingers could make the same observations about left-wing blogs, but gratuitous insults are easier to overlook when they're directed at someone else and surrounded by an article I agree with.)
• Instapundit is out. Instapundit is the Reader's Digest of blogging, recycling the same seven articles over and over — but where the Digest has its monthly Trapped By a Grizzly!, Wonders of Science, etc., Glen Reynolds has his More Crushing of Dissent, Flood the Zone, and I'm Shocked the Media Isn't Picking Up on This. I'm looking for something with more insight and less deja vu.
• The blog should be mostly political, and measurably right of center. It doesn't have to be all politics all the time — I read plenty of those — but the "B" topic should at least be interesting. This rules out, say, Jeff Jarvis, who mostly writes about media with a little politics on the side (and who's too much of a centrist regardless).
• I wouldn't mind if the blog were not among the top 50 most popular, just for variety's sake.

So. Any suggestions or recommendations?

- Posted by Scott Forbes at 1:44 pm. comments.

Sunday, 12 September 2004

Interesting times. On the first anniversary of 9/11, we were still in mourning: The emotions were too raw to talk about, the anger and grief too close to the surface. There were formal ceremonies and solemn remembrances, but little in the way of catharsis.

On the second anniversary of 9/11, a little more time had passed; we gained a bit more perspective, more distance between us and a day that altered the course of history. People talked about what they did, where they were, how they felt, and shared stories.

On the third anniversary of 9/11, we're one step further removed. For a precious few of us, December 7th, 1941 is still within living memory — but for most it's an event we read about in history books, rather than experiencing ourselves. Time heals these wounds, by marching on with our without us; we'll never stop remembering, and we'll tell our children and grandchildren the stories of that day… but, eventually, 9/11 will cease to be the central theme of the American story.

My grandparents lived through the Great Depression, and some of the lessons they learned from that time stayed with them through the rest of their days. My parents remember the Kennedy assassination. In the words of the ancient Chinese curse, we live in interesting times — and in a time of historic blunders, there's always the danger that 9/11 will be replaced in our thoughts by something even worse.

History will remember these last four years as a time of missed opportunities — failures to prevent, failures to act, failures of strategy, and failures of competence — but I'm optimistic that we can do better.

We have to do better.

- Posted by Scott Forbes at 1:53 am. comments.

Saturday, 11 September 2004

Turnabout. Demonstrating once again that The Road to Surfdom is A Yank in Oz's evil twin, Tim Dunlop posts these directions for expat Australians who want to vote from overseas.

- Posted by Scott Forbes at 10:05 am. comments.

Saturday, 11 September 2004

So many links, so little time. Busy, busy week — the deadline for requesting an absentee ballot from overseas varies by state, but if you haven't sent your request in already then you're cutting it pretty fine. We're making an all-out effort to find the other 99,000 U.S. expats in Australia and get their forms in the mail.

Meanwhile, here's a few random funnies:

• The Onion Prophecies (via Daily Kos)
• Rowboat Veterans for Truth
• A Bush campaign commercial, if he were running against Jesus (Mad Magazine, via Atrios)
• Shocking revelations in Kitty Kelley's new book (via The Peking Duck)
• The incomparable Fafblog gets arrested by Tom Ridge

We'll have a voter registration booth (or an absentee ballot request booth, depending on how you look at it) up and running in downtown Sydney all next week, in the mornings near the Martin Place rail station; look for someone dressed as Uncle Sam (no, not me) and some helpful people with Kerry buttons.

- Posted by Scott Forbes at 9:53 am. comments.

Tuesday, 31 August 2004

A thousand words:
Brought to you by The American Prospect, by way of Genf at Daily Kos.

- Posted by Scott Forbes at 11:48 am. comments.

Tuesday, 31 August 2004

Vice versa: Tim Dunlop's Road to Surfdom is the mirror-universe version of this blog: He's an Aussie living in the United States, commenting on Australian politics as seen from abroad.

With Oz's elections now scheduled for October 9th, Tim's written an Australian election primer for American readers that's worth reading.

- Posted by Scott Forbes at 12:35 am. comments.

Sunday, 29 August 2004

Moonlighting. I'm guest-blogging (in a manner of speaking) at One Hand Clapping today, making the case for John Kerry at Donald Sensing's invitation. I'm not sure how many swing voters I'll sway (zero would be my guess), but there's something to be said for trying.

- Posted by Scott Forbes at 2:23 am. comments.

Thursday, 19 August 2004

The case for war, revisited. Back before the Iraq war began, I read a blog post — I've forgotten where — by someone who said "I support a war to depose Saddam Hussein, but only with a Democrat in the White House. The Democrats would rebuild Iraq after the war; the Republicans would screw it up."

At the time, I thought he was joking.

---

John Kerry has talken a lot of flack for his position on the Iraq war: He voted to give President Bush the authority to wage war (a decision that left-wing cartoonist Ted Rall mercilessly skewers here), but he's been sharply critical of Bush's post-war performance. Many of Kerry's supporters opposed the war (or, more to the point, anyone who opposed the war is fervently opposing Bush this election), and many who told the pollsters they supported the war in mid-2003 are now swinging into the "bad idea" camp.

My own position is not far removed from Kerry's: I supported the war, but criticized the Bush administration repeatedly — both before the war and after it. Here's what I said over a year ago, when we were still coming down from the post-war euphoria:

A bold leader would have declared that Saddam must go whether he has WMDs or not, instead of trying to manufacture the proof we didn't have and strong-arm other nations into accepting it. Saddam had plenty of sins that justified armed intervention to remove him, and opening up a real live debate on how well the Peace of Westphalia is holding up after 400 years just might do wonders for America's reputation and security and silence the critics who fear a world where America alone determines the limits of national sovereignty.

So I have to confess some sympathy for where Kerry is right now: If I'd been in his shoes, I might have been a bit clearer about my reasons for voting as I did — but I'd have voted to depose Saddam. (Then again, my reasons can't be reduced to a single sound bite either… so if I were Kerry I'd probably be accused of flip-flopping and straddling too. On the national stage you can only have one of two positions; nuance is not an option.)

---

If I could go back to the Democratic primaries, and contrast the candidates' positions on Iraq in short, pithy sentences:

• Lieberman: I trusted President Bush, and still do. The war in Iraq was a good idea. I'm Serious About Terrorism. Neocons love me. Dean is a nut.
• Kerry: I made the mistake of trusting President Bush with powers I'll want to have myself very shortly. Everyone is lukewarm about me. I'm a combat veteran.
• Dean: I never trusted the President — and I was right. He fudged the case for war. Invading Iraq didn't make us safer. Liberals love me. Lieberman is Bush Lite.
• Clark: I'm a general. I don't know the first thing about campaigning for public office. What was the question again?
• Edwards: I'm running for Vice-President!
• Kucinich: I'll pull our troops out within 90 days. I'm really from the liberal wing of the Green Party, but I'm cleverly disguised as a Democrat.
• Sharpton: I'm just here for the free publicity.
• Gephardt: Bush's Iraq strategy was a miserable failure. Free trade is bad. Labor unions like me. Dean is a nut.

Looking back, it's no wonder that Kerry won the nomination… and that he has trouble expressing his views on Iraq without it sounding like a straddle. Of all the primary candidates, Dean and Lieberman were the only ones who managed to map out clear, concise, memorable positions on Iraq — and Lieberman's position was out of step with a party that wanted to oppose Bush in 2004. Gephardt's "no daylight between us and the President" strategy was the one Democrats took to the polls in 2002; Karl Rove and the voters punished them for it, and the rank-and-file members weren't going do that again.

Howard Dean, meanwhile, staked out the position that appealed most strongly to the anti-Bush forces — and, arguably, Dean was right about the Bush administration overstating the case for war. As I've said, I think there was a good argument for deposing Saddam by force… and the Bush administration botched that argument. Badly. Bush's case for war included too many red herrings: Cherry-picked intelligence reports, inaccurate claims about Saddam's ties to 9/11, and patently false statements about Iraq's nuclear program. If I had relied on George W. Bush to argue the case for war in Iraq, I'd have a lot of egg on my face right now.

And we do have a lot of egg on our face. Bush's bungled diplomacy has left us holding the bag in Iraq — we don't have, and never had, the legitimacy required to face down the likes of Al-Sadr. If we'd had a stronger mandate going in, then there'd be much stronger public support (in Iraq, in America, and around the world) for going into Najaf and putting down Al-Sadr's militia; as it stands, our hand-picked interim government is too weak to impose itself on him. This isn't a military problem: It's a political problem, and we've dug ourselves a political hole.

I'm supporting Kerry for a number of reasons, but one of them is to stop digging.

In terms of election-year gotcha politics, Kerry's position on Iraq is weakened by the fact that he voted to authorize the war — but, as conservative pundit Fareed Zakaria writes in this week's Washington Post, Kerry's position is the most defensible on the subject. Knowing what I know now, I still would have supported in principle a decision to depose Saddam Hussein by military force; in practice, the Bush administration's incompetence at nation-building has erased the gains I expected to realize.

We're rid of Saddam, but we've replaced his tyranny with a failed state — one where the central government does not have a monopoly on force — and we're no closer to solving the terrorism problem than we were in 2002. It's too late to reverse the disastrous decision to disband the Iraqi army, or to re-open the window of opportunity that we squandered when capturing Saddam… but Kerry's election will at least give us the opportunity to start moving in the right direction again.

- Posted by Scott Forbes at 9:12 am. comments.

Tuesday, 17 August 2004

Thirty seconds. Thirty seconds is how long I can talk about the Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction Program, and the lack of attention given to it, before flying into an incoherent rage. Fortunately, the New York Times's Nick Kristof can speak to the issue more eloquently than I can, and explains how George W. Bush has left America more vulnerable to the number one, highest priority, most pressing and urgent danger we face: A nuclear weapon smuggled onto our soil.

(Link via Matthew Yglesias.)

- Posted by Scott Forbes at 12:08 pm. comments.

Sunday, 15 August 2004

The bounce that stayed. The pundits sniffed at the four-point "bounce" that John Kerry received from the Democratic National Convention — previous candidates had climbed in the polls, at least temporarily, by as much as 16 points. But in the weeks since he accepted the nomination, something unusual has happened with Kerry: His "bounce" never came back down again.

Kerry is now leading by as much as seven points in Florida polling, and is up by three points in Ohio — both of which are must-win states for the Bush campaign. In Pennsylvania, which was expected to be a battleground state, Kerry is up by eight points; in New Hampshire, a state Bush carried in 2000, Kerry has a seven-point lead.

Bush's support is eroding across the near South, with Virginia, Tennessee, Arkansas, and North Carolina all wavering (say it with me: "Vice President John Edwards"). In the West, Nevada and Arizona (both Bush states in 2000) are on the bubble; in the Midwest Missouri is a statistical tie. Bush still has the support of his base in the Deep South and the Rocky Mountains — but Kerry's numbers are slowly trending upward, week after week, and the GOP's desperately negative campaigning does not appear to be swaying voters.

This year's election is far from over — one pollster says if the election were held today, Kerry would win 228 electoral votes, Bush 197, and the other 113 are too close to call — but as Kerry's "bounce" becomes a sustained climb, Bush is running out of time to turn his campaign around. Eleven weeks from now, America goes to the polls; eleven weeks after that, if the current trends continue, John Kerry goes to the White House.

- Posted by Scott Forbes at 11:15 am. comments.

Friday, 13 August 2004

Domino theory. Beneath all the scare tactics about WMDs and Al Qaeda, the neocon case for war in Iraq was based on a radical premise: That we could invade Iraq, topple Saddam, establish a democratic government, and then leverage that success to spread democracy throughout the Mideast. It was the Cold War's domino theory in reverse; knock down a tyrant, they said, and the surrounding despots will fall.

Spreading democracy throughout the Mideast is an excellent, excellent goal, and ultimately it's the key to victory in protecting America from terrorist attack. We know that terrorism finds its motive in politics, and in political pressures that have no outlet within the ruling system: From Basque separatists to the Irish Republican Army, from Al Qaeda to the Ku Klux Klan, the common theme among terrorists is a cause that authority has denied. We know that democracy grants a hearing to even the most radical of proposals: By offering hope that they too might someday sway the masses, free speech gives fringe groups an incentive to follow the law. In principle and in practice, democracy is an effective antidote to terrorism — and, regardless, democracy is the only form of government that America holds to be legitimate. We should encourage it wherever we can.

So the problem with this grand neocon strategy isn't the objective. It's the execution where I think the Bush administration has run aground; we achieved the "topple Saddam" part flawlessly, but the step where we were supposed to build a democracy has turned out to be much harder than the initial neocon projections. It turns out setting up the initial conditions for a democracy is harder than it looks, especially in a country that's never had one and has no nearby example to follow. (Our success in transplanting democracy to Eastern Europe was much more a function of proximity to Western Europe; neocons like to think it was the spontaneous result of Reagan's "Evil Empire" speech, but I think all those role models on the other side of the Iron Curtain had more than a little to do with it.)

I have nothing but admiration for the men and women of our armed forces, who are over there flailing away trying to establish civil order — but building a successful democracy in Iraq requires more than just military force. Iraq's middle class, the doctors and lawyers and professors who would form the backbone of civil society, are in hiding; the diplomats and foreign aid workers who should be building Iraq's social capital have fled. The political system we've established is starting to look more like Hosni Mubarak's Egypt than a functioning democracy; Ayad Allawi is consolidating his hold on power, and possibly setting himself up to be Prime Minister-for-life.

My sense now is that George W. Bush has neither the political capital nor the international prestige to follow through on the neocon vision, if indeed that vision was ever possible. In fact, I suspect that no Republican, in the present circumstances, can lead us to victory in the so-called War on Terror: It's an "only Nixon can go to China" problem, but in reverse. Only a Democrat can now argue the case for democracy without getting tangled up in doctrines of pre-emption and intelligence failures; Bush and his GOP colleagues can't make the argument effectively.

- Posted by Scott Forbes at 1:53 pm. comments.

Wednesday, 11 August 2004

Nobel Prize watch: Brazilian scientists have decoded the coffee genome. Brazilian agriculture minister Roberto Rodrigues proclaimed that Brazil would use the genetic code to create a "super-coffee," which will undoubtedly become the earth's dominant life form.

The BBC's Steve Kingstone is having fun with this one as well; his report includes the quip "Suddenly, scientists know an awful lot about coffee in Brazil."

- Posted by Scott Forbes at 11:17 am. comments.

Sunday, 08 August 2004

No pain, no gain. Today was Sydney's annual "City to Surf" run, a 14-kilometer (8.75-mile) race from Hyde Park to Bondi Beach, and let me just say: Ow. Ow ow ow. I wasn't sure I'd be healthy enough for this, given last week's Adventure of the Throat Infection (below) and my general out-of-shapeness; I did it in 2000, but I was younger and pounds lighter then.

Of course, I didn't run the race — I walked the course in a completely un-respectable time of 3 hours, 15 minutes — but even so it was more exercise than I usually get. My feet and legs are now sending an important message to the brain, along the lines of "thought you could get away with this, eh?" and involving the pain receptors…

…but it was for a good cause. There were about ten of us walking with our Kerry/Edwards T-shirts (you wouldn't believe how difficult it is to get campaign gear over here; until today we had a grand total of two Howard Dean buttons between the 180 of us), intimidating the lone Bush/Cheney supporter who wore his shirt (and turned out to be a Young Republican on a summer internship) and handing out flyers to Americans in the 30,000-strong crowd.

Meanwhile, the other runners included everything from samurai warriors to inflatable dinosaurs. There are three starting times for the participants: One for the serious runners, one for the wannabe serious runners, and one for people who are just in it for fun. Even after four years of living in Sydney, it still amazes me they can confidently schedule an outdoor event for August (which is the middle of winter down here) and get shorts and t-shirt weather.

A good time was had by all, except for my legs and feet.

- Posted by Scott Forbes at 1:58 pm. comments.

Friday, 06 August 2004

Today's Aussie trivia question: The Australians call it glandular fever. For ten points, what's the American name of this disease?

[Jeopardy theme music]

If you said "mono" or "mononucleosis", award yourself ten points. I've spent the past week talking like the Elephant Man and looking like I swallowed a football; the good news is that I don't appear to actually have mono — it's just a nasty throat infection. (The local doctor's advice: Take these antibiotics. If they clear up the problem, you had a throat infection. If not, you have glandular fever.)

The good news is that, since I'm an Australian permanent resident now, I get to use the public health system and receive my drugs for free. ("Free" in the "already paid for by my tax dollars" sense, that is. I pay taxes to the Australian government, just like resident aliens in America pay to Uncle Sam — except that I also have to file returns with Uncle Sam, because America taxes its citizens whether they are. Most countries only tax residents.)

Anyhow, Australia's public health system isn't bad: It isn't the best thing since sliced bread, but it's a good use of tax dollars. It raises health care up to the level of fire prevention, education, or public safety, providing a basic service that anyone can access. If you want better health care you pay for private insurance and get access to private hospitals, which generally have fresher coats of paint, more doctors and nurses on call, newer equipment, and so on… which, if you think about it, isn't too different from what you do when basic police protection doesn't meet your needs. You buy an alarm system or hire your own security guards.

There's an underlying issue here about the fundamental role of government, which if I were Steven Den Beste I'd rattle off a few thousand words about butterfly mating rituals and then segue into The Purpose of Government as my main theme; but since I'm slightly under the weather I'll save that for another day. For now I'll just nominate penicillin as the 20th century's best discovery.

- Posted by Scott Forbes at 7:20 am. comments.

Wednesday, 28 July 2004

I've seen the future... and it's good.

- Posted by Scott Forbes at 8:36 am. comments.

Wednesday, 21 July 2004

Foot fetish. For those who are following the latest scandal from the people who brought you Travelgate, Filegate, Whitewatergate, and dozens of other made-up events that turned out to be all smoke and no fire, the latest accusation is that Sandy Berger, formerly National Security Adviser under the Clinton administration, was caught stuffing secret documents into his pants and socks.

No, seriously, that's what they're accusing him of. Former President Clinton had asked Berger to review thousands of pages of classified documents in the National Archives for submission to the 9/11 Commission; Berger visited the Archives three times, with staff members present on each occasion. He brought with him a leather portfolio, containing business papers and other (non-classified) documents, and he took notes while he was working, which is against the rules.

On one of the visits, apparently, copies of two classified documents got mixed in with Berger's personal papers and ended up in his leather portfolio. He took them home, which is also a no-no, and subsequently the Archives contacted him to inquire about a third document that had gone missing. Berger promptly looked through his papers and returned the two documents he had, as well as the notes he had taken.

The Justice Department investigated, as they should have, and found no evidence of wrongdoing. This was well on its way to becoming a routine non-story, with the investigative equivalent of a police report and a warning…

…until this week, when someone leaked the story and added a few embellishments. In the sexy new version of the tale, Berger had been caught sneaking documents out of the Archives by hiding them in his clothes. The story is not that he left the Archives with his notebook in his pocket and a leather portfolio filled with documents in plain view — that's way too dull, so our friends in the GOP sexed it up. Instead, Berger was pilfering documents by dumping them down the front of his pants; the crack team of National Archive librarians witnessed this act, but chose not to stop him for their own inscrutable reasons; and Berger subsequently destroyed the missing document in order to cover up… the Clinton administration's success in foiling an Al Qaeda plot.

And, just to stretch the truth a bit further, the latest (anonynmous) claim is that Berger was smuggling documents in his socks. How the heck do you smuggle a document in your socks? I can see maybe folding up one piece of paper and stuffing it into a tube sock, but a document? How do you walk out of the National Archives with a binder wrapped around your foot?

I think the silly season is upon us.

- Posted by Scott Forbes at 8:47 am. comments.

Monday, 19 July 2004

Extra! Extra! Read all about it! Guess who made the front page of today's Washington Post? Check out the photo!

I helped to set up that booth. (I'm not in the photo, because I had to scuttle off to work afterwards — but, hey, I was there.) What are you doing to elect John Kerry?

- Posted by Scott Forbes at 12:30 pm. comments.

Monday, 12 July 2004

On the subject of postponing elections.

It has long been a grave question whether any government, not too strong for the liberties of its people, can be strong enough to maintain its own existence in great emergencies.

On this point the present rebellion brought our republic to a severe test; and a presidential election occurring in regular course during the rebellion added not a little to the strain. If the loyal people, united, were put to the utmost of their strength by the rebellion, must they not fail when divided, and partially paralized [sic], by a political war among themselves?

But the election was a necessity.

We can not have free government without elections; and if the rebellion could force us to forego, or postpone a national election it might fairly claim to have already conquered and ruined us. The strife of the election is but human-nature practically applied to the facts of the case. What has occurred in this case, must ever recur in similar cases. Human-nature will not change. In any future great national trial, compared with the men of this, we shall have as weak, and as strong; as silly and as wise; as bad and good. Let us, therefore, study the incidents of this, as philosophy to learn wisdom from, and none of them as wrongs to be revenged.

But the election, along with its incidental, and undesirable strife, has done good too. It has demonstrated that a people's government can sustain a national election, in the midst of a great civil war. Until now it has not been known to the world that this was a possibility. It shows that, even among candidates of the same party, he who is most devoted to the Union, and most opposed to treason, can receive most of the people's votes. It shows also, to the extent yet known, that we have more men now, than we had when the war began. Gold is good in its place; but living, brave, patriotic men, are better than gold.

— Abraham Lincoln, November 10, 1864.

Link via a Daily Kos comment.

- Posted by Scott Forbes at 9:44 am. comments.

Thursday, 08 July 2004

When I get older, losing my hair… A happy (belated) birthday to Ringo Starr, who on Wednesday became the first Beatle to turn 64.

- Posted by Scott Forbes at 1:34 pm. comments.

Wednesday, 07 July 2004

Sound bite. I just did my first radio interview in, oh, let's say "ever" (college radio doesn't count) with Rod Quinn of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, talking about John Edwards and his selection as Kerry's VP candidate. I mentioned this in passing a few weeks ago, but for the record: I'm now an officer of Democrats Abroad Australia, the Democratic Party's chapter for American expats Down Under, and as of today I'm a spokesman. (For someone who wasn't even a Democrat a year ago, this has been quite a trip.)

The interview was a ten-minute softball Q&A that could have been titled "Who is John Edwards?" — I think the toughest question Rod asked was whether I thought the GOP would make hay about Kerry's criticisms of Edwards during the primaries, to which I mumbled something about how people would understand the difference between the primary and the election. I managed to say a few good things about Edwards, we talked a little about elections in general (first two-Senator ticket since 1960, etc.), and it's amazing how quickly ten minutes goes by when you're on the air.

As far as I know the interview only aired in Canberra, so there's little chance that anyone I know actually heard it here in Sydney. Nonetheless, it's another personal milestone on the road to taking my country back.

- Posted by Scott Forbes at 7:27 am. comments.

Tuesday, 06 July 2004

Steal this quote. From the back cover of John Edwards' book, by way of Daily Kos:

- Posted by Scott Forbes at 2:48 pm. comments.

Sunday, 04 July 2004

Horn section. I live about fifteen minutes from downtown Sydney, in a nice little suburb called Petersham. Petersham is the "Little Portugal" of the Sydney area, and we're about two blocks from the center of it: There are lots of good restaurants within walking distance (spicy chicken — mmm), they block off a street and have cultural events just down the road, and so on.

Usually I don't spend a lot of time ruminating about life in Little Portugal, and I certainly don't follow European soccer. I did notice last month a poster or two that I hadn't seen before, and glanced at them long enough to decipher that Portugal was hosting the "Euro 2004" championships this year — and then my chicken sandwich was ready, so I left and went about my business.

Weeks went by, and gradually the number of Portuguese flags and posters increased; I mean, there were a lot of them to begin with already, but all of a sudden they were everywhere. Through osmosis I gathered that Portugal was doing well in the tournament. I was happy for my neighbors.

And then we come to this weekend, when I can barely leave the house without running into a carload of screaming Portuguese-Australians, waving red and green flags out every window and honking their horns like Portugal had just won a major world war. Single-handledly.

The only thing that could make matters worse is if they were playing the championship against Greece, Petersham's second-largest ethnic community… so, naturally, they are. Carloads of screaming Greek-Australians are now driving around outside, hamming it up with the Portuguese, and creating a wall of noise that sounds like a New York traffic jam on steroids.

It's a strange, strange way to spend the Fourth of July. Luckily I made it to the American Society's Independence Day picnic yesterday, and got a healthy dose of Americana — and signed up 30-40 people to request their absentee ballots.

- Posted by Scott Forbes at 10:20 am. comments.

Thursday, 01 July 2004

Pants on fire, part 2: Dick Cheney, caught in the act.

See also Rumsfeld, Donald.

- Posted by Scott Forbes at 1:03 pm. comments.

Thursday, 01 July 2004

Power tools. New on the blogroll is a great idea from Judd Legum of the Center for American Progress: Winning Argument, a blog that collects the facts you'll need to win a backyard debate for the progressives. Each entry is a new topic, and the articles so far range from the CPA didn't adequately prepare for the transfer of power in Iraq to American CEOs are overpaid.

I'll probably end up using this site like a handyman who's just discovered duct tape. Anyhow, check it out. (Link via TAPPED.)

- Posted by Scott Forbes at 3:31 am. comments.

Sunday, 27 June 2004

Joke of the day. It's 2005, and an old man walks up to the front gate of the White House. Speaking to the Marine guard on duty, he says "I'd like to see President Bush, please."

The Marine replies "I'm sorry sir, but George Bush is no longer President. John Kerry's in the White House now."

The old man nods, and goes away.

The next day the old man comes back again, and asks to see President Bush. The Marine, a little more curtly this time, tells him that Bush is no longer President.

The third day the old man comes up and asks to see President Bush. "Listen, old man," says the guard, "I've told you for three days running that Bush isn't President anymore! What is your problem?"

The old man says, "Oh, there's no problem — I just like hearing you say it."

 

The Marine snaps to attention, salutes, and says, "I'll see you tomorrow."

- Posted by Scott Forbes at 7:25 am. comments.

Sunday, 27 June 2004

Sovereign immunity. Imagine that Iraq is a patient on an operating table. We're performing surgery to remove a malignant brain tumor, a complex procedure that normally requires a team of 15 surgeons and assistants… but we're trying to do it with six, and none of our would-be doctors have done it before. (In fact, our chief surgeon — after watching his predecessor operate on Kosovo, Haiti and Somalia — declared that our hospital should get out of this branch of medicine.)

The instruments in our operating theater consist entirely of knives. The knives are the world's finest, and are very sharp, but we have a critical shortage of blood plasma, sterile bandages, and other important tools that would help us control the bleeding and stabilize the patient. We do have a supply of these items in reserve, but our chief surgeon decided not to call them up before he began the operation; if he calls for them now it'll make him look bad, and they'll take forever to get here regardless.

We've now removed most of the brain tumor (we think), but the cancer has spilled into the bloodstream and is damaging other vital organs. We're cutting open the patient to attack the cancers where they grow (when your only tool is a scalpel, etc.), but this approach is leaving a lot of ugly scars. Chemocratic elections would be more effective at treating the cancer… but apparently the chief doesn't think the patient is stable enough, and fears that chemo would kill off cells he's trying to preserve.

At least one of our brain surgeons has managed to dirty his hands (and, in spite of this, is still operating), so the patient's natural immune system is starting to react to us. We frisked the patient's pockets while he was unconscious, and in spite of what hospital bureaucrats promised us before we started, Iraq doesn't have enough money to pay for the operation — not that we have any illusions about whether the patient would want to anymore, or about how grateful he'll be if and when he recovers. We also didn't find a gun in his pocket, though that was supposedly one of the reasons he needed treatment right away.

If you disagree with the surgeon about any aspect of this procedure, it must be because you hate our hospital, you hate the surgeon, you're anti-surgery, or you didn't think the patient needed treatment. In any case, your disloyalty is appalling: You should be standing behind our chief surgeon in this time of crisis, and it doesn't make sense to change doctors in mid-procedure.

And, finally, our chief surgeon — who has a pressing engagement — is about to take Iraq off the anesthetic. Even though we're still up to our elbows in the patient, our chief has declared that the surgery will end as scheduled… and, to demonstrate how well we've done, we'll return Iraq to full consciousness. Our sawbones-in-chief expects that the patient will be up and about momentarily; oh yes, he'll be walking around the operating room, thanking his doctors and making a speedy recovery from this successful operation.

Just you wait and see.

- Posted by Scott Forbes at 7:03 am. comments.

Saturday, 26 June 2004

How to succeed in blogging without really trying: My server logs show a spike in traffic — almost double the usual volume — ever since I used the words obscene, sex, and Jeri Ryan one after the other.

Have I mentioned that Nicole Kidman is from Australia?

- Posted by Scott Forbes at 5:21 am. comments.

Thursday, 24 June 2004

The difference in a nutshell: Hardcore Democrats over at Daily Kos are wringing their hands about whether it's proper to make a political issue out of GOP candidate Jack Ryan's sexual habits.

Hardcore Republicans would have subpoenaed his ex-wife by now. And then threatened her with perjury charges unless she gave them a damning statement.

- Posted by Scott Forbes at 11:39 pm. comments.

Thursday, 24 June 2004

And the war-horse you rode in on: As part of his ongoing mandate to restore honor and dignity to the Executive Branch, Vice-President Dick Cheney made an obscene suggestion (parental discretion advised) to Democratic Senator Patrick Leahy at this week's taking of the annual Senate class photo.

I guess Cheney is a little touchy about being accused of war profiteering.

- Posted by Scott Forbes at 11:29 pm. comments.

Thursday, 24 June 2004

Sex, lies, Star Trek, and the GOP: Speaking of my home state — if you haven't been following the meltdown of Jack Ryan, the GOP Senate candidate in Illinois (as opposed to Jack Ryan, the protagonist in several Tom Clancy novels), then you're missing an absolute classic. It seems that our man Jack had a messy divorce back in 2000, and had the court records sealed because (he claimed) they contained information that would be damaging to his young son, who has "special needs."

Apparently the younger Ryan really does have a learning disability, poor fellow, but his son had nothing to do with Ryan's reason for wanting to keep those records out of the public eye: According to the testimony of his ex-wife — actress Jeri Ryan, who played "Seven of Nine" on TV's Star Trek: Voyager — the reason for their divorce was that Jack repeatedly took her to swinger's clubs and pressured her to have sex in front of other people.

And, to make matters worse, Jack Ryan swore to his GOP colleagues there was nothing in his divorce papers that could cause him embarrassment — while knowing perfectly well that this bombshell was in there!

Ryan's campaign was already a lost cause: He was down by 22 points to rising Democratic star Barack Obama, in a solidly Blue state where the previous Republican governor was indicted for fraud and corruption. But since George W. Bush is currently not on the ballot in Illinois, a problem caused by the GOP decision to hold their convention in New York on September 11th — twelve days after the Illinois filing deadline — Ryan could end up at the top of the GOP ticket in Illinois, and his implosion could take down a number of GOP incumbents in the House.

Meanwhile, the pundits are having an absolute field day with this one. Some screamingly funny quotes from blogs and Chicago Tribune readers, many of them courtesy of the Tribune's Eric Zorn:

• Dan Johnson-Weinberger: "You have to really question the judgment of anyone who at one time was married to Jeri Ryan, and now, for whatever reason, is not."
• Gen. JC Christian, patriot: "On the surface, the Jack Ryan scandal looks like a simple case of a man taking his wife to sex clubs and then pressuring her to have sex with him while everyone else watches, but I think there is more to this story."
• The Peoria Journal-Star: "'There's no breaking of marriage laws' or the Ten Commandments, (Ryan) said in an interview on WLS-AM. If the worst people can say is that over eight years of marriage he took his wife to places 'she felt uncomfortable … then I think people will say, gosh, that guy's lived a pretty clean life.' Some people may say that, but probably not many in central Illinois, where the average resident is not accustomed to using 'sex' and 'club' in the same sentence and following it with the phrase 'pretty clean life.'"
• Mark Konkol, Red Streak: "Watching the public flogging of Republican U.S. Senate candidate Jack Ryan on Channel 11 Monday was pleasantly disturbing. According to his divorce papers, that's how he likes it."
• Bob M.: "My only outrage is this: I am a Democrat. We normally back the sex candidate."
• Dave: "Jack Ryan has issued literature talking about his support for 'family values.' Is asking your wife to have sex in front of other people a family value?"

And, in my personal favorite, the Chicagoist blog draws a picture for you.

Now, normally I'd support the principle that a politician's private life should remain private — but the GOP did spend several million dollars poking the taxpayers' nose into Bill Clinton's sex life, they're trying to make an issue out of whether Kerry takes communion or not, they do make a lot of noise about being the party of morality and family values, Ryan's the guy who was sending a campaign flunky to follow his opponent into the bathroom last month, this particular "private life" is both on the public record and in a public place, and Ryan did lie to his colleagues about the potential damage his divorce papers could do.

And, more importantly, this is laugh-out-loud hilarious.

- Posted by Scott Forbes at 8:50 am. comments.

Wednesday, 23 June 2004

Up, up and awayyyy! I have to link to this Boing Boing post about the annual Superman festival in Metropolis, Illinois, because… well, this is difficult to explain, so I'll just blurt it out: My father was Superman.

Back in the early Seventies, the city of Metropolis, IL (pop. 15,000) discovered that it was the only city in America actually named "Metropolis" — which meant, of course, that it had to be the home of Superman! The town paper promptly renamed itself the Metropolis Planet (it's not a daily paper, alas), and the city began holding an annual Superman festival, which they still have.

One of the events at the festival is a mock bank robbery, which of course is foiled by the Man of Steel. Finding actors to play the criminals is relatively easy, but the role of Superman is a bit more demanding — you have to to look the part, and you have to be willing to work for peanuts.

…which is where my dad comes in. At six feet six inches tall, with blue eyes, dark hair, and the build of a college shot-put athlete (which he was), Dad was ideal for the part — and so for several years the city of Metropolis hired Dad to foil the bank robbery and to stand around posing for pictures. He had a custom-made Superman costume hanging in his closet for decades (he sold it to a collector a few years ago), and somewhere in a photo album back home there's a picture of my sister and me, ages two and four, sitting on Dad's biceps as he does the classic Superman pose.

Oh, shut up. You only wish your dad had his own Superman costume.

- Posted by Scott Forbes at 8:43 am. comments.

Tuesday, 22 June 2004

In other news, Reagan is still dead: I tend to agree with John Callender over at lies.com that catching Dick Cheney in a bold-faced lie is barely even newsworthy anymore, but nonetheless. From the Post's "In the Loop" column, by way of the DNC's Kicking Ass:

Borger: "Well, let's go to Mohamed Atta for a minute, because you mentioned him as well. You have said in the past that it was, quote, 'pretty well confirmed.' "

Cheney: "No, I never said that."

Borger: "Okay."

Cheney: "Never said that."

Borger: "I think that is … "

Cheney: "Absolutely not. What I said was the Czech intelligence service reported after 9/11 that Atta had been in Prague on April 9th of 2001, where he allegedly met with an Iraqi intelligence official. We have never been able to confirm that nor have we been able to knock it down."

— "The Today Show," June 17, 2004.

Cheney: "Well, what we now have that's developed since you and I last talked, Tim, of course, was that report that — it's been pretty well confirmed that he did go to Prague and he did meet with a senior official of the Iraqi intelligence service in Czechoslovakia last April, several months before the attack. Now, what the purpose of that was, what transpired between them, we simply don't know at this point, but that's clearly an avenue that we want to pursue."

— "Meet the Press," December 9, 2001.

- Posted by Scott Forbes at 1:08 pm. comments.

Tuesday, 22 June 2004

It's the Deficit, Stupid: The Washington Post's Sebastian Mallaby explains why a second term for Dubya would lead to an Argentina-style collapse of the U.S. economy.

This is not hyperbole. Bush's combination of tax-cutting and lavish spending is a fiscal timebomb: His tax cuts are not even defensible as a short-term stimulus (they allow the wealthy to accumulate more wealth with less effort, which if anything makes the economy worse), and his spending habits are, to paraphrase John McCain, an insult to drunken sailors.

There was a time when Republicans were the party of smaller government and of balanced-budget "contracts with America." Apparently that contract was only valid while the Democrats were in charge.

- Posted by Scott Forbes at 8:39 am. comments.

Saturday, 19 June 2004

Mojave, we are go for launch. The FAA has now designated California's Mojave Airport as America's first inland spaceport — and, as of this writing, we are T-minus 49 hours, 11 minutes from the world's first private manned space flight.

- Posted by Scott Forbes at 12:19 am. comments.

Thursday, 17 June 2004

Elaborate Deceptions. Donald Rumsfeld has to go.

"Notorious human rights abusers, including, among others, Burma, Cuba, North Korea, Iran, and Zimbabwe, have long sought to shield their abuses from the eyes of the world by staging elaborate deceptions and denying access to international human rights monitors. Until recently, Saddam Hussein used similar means to hide the crimes of his regime."

— George W. Bush, June 26th, 2003.

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, acting at the request of George J. Tenet, the director of central intelligence, ordered military officials in Iraq last November to hold a man suspected of being a senior Iraqi terrorist at a high-level detention center there but not list him on the prison's rolls, senior Pentagon and intelligence officials said Wednesday.

This prisoner and other "ghost detainees" were hidden largely to prevent the International Committee of the Red Cross from monitoring their treatment, and to avoid disclosing their location to an enemy, officials said.

— The New York Times, June 17, 2004.

- Posted by Scott Forbes at 11:40 am. comments.

Tuesday, 15 June 2004

Despicable crimes. Tim Dunlop at The Road to Surfdom reminds us that the UN International Day in Support of Victims of Torture is coming up on June 26th.

He also links to this…

"Yet torture continues to be practiced around the world by rogue regimes whose cruel methods match their determination to crush the human spirit. Beating, burning, rape, and electric shock are some of the grisly tools such regimes use to terrorize their own citizens. These despicable crimes cannot be tolerated by a world committed to justice."

— George W. Bush, June 26th, 2003.

…and to this.

"You have asked for our Office's views regarding the standards of conduct under the Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman and Degrading Treatment or punishment as implemented by Sections 2340-2340A of title 18 of The United States Code. As we understand it, this question has arisen in the context of the conduct of interrogations outside of the United States. We conclude below that […] certain acts may be cruel, inhuman, or degrading, but still not produce pain and suffering of the requisite intensity to fall within Section 2340A's proscription against torture. We conclude by examining the possible defenses that would negate any claim that certain interrogation methods violate the statute."

— Alberto Gonzales, Counsel to George W. Bush, August 1st, 2002.

He knew that it was happening, and he knew that it was wrong. Read the whole thing.

- Posted by Scott Forbes at 11:40 am. comments.

Sunday, 13 June 2004

Freudian slip.

"It's a numbers error. It's not a political judgment that said, 'Let's see if we can cook the books.' We can't get away with that now. Nobody was out to cook the books. Errors crept in."

— Colin Powell, "This Week", June 13th, 2004 (emphasis mine).

- Posted by Scott Forbes at 6:33 pm. comments.

Thursday, 10 June 2004

So you're telling me Cheney is not dead. I think this site is a parody, but lately it's hard to tell. (Link via Boing Boing.)

- Posted by Scott Forbes at 7:49 am. comments.

Wednesday, 09 June 2004

High crimes. As of this week I'm officially partisan, so my objectivity is no longer beyond question — as opposed to last week, when I was totally free of bias — but the latest revalations from behind the Bush administration's curtain of secrecy, that administration officials explicitly sought to evade prosecution for torture (and asserted that the President has the power to disregard laws and treaties at will), are not leaving much room for doubt.

Taken together with the Bush administration's actions in Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib and elsewhere, these memos represent a conspiracy to violate Title 18, Part I, Chapter 113C of the U.S. Code. It's not a question of international law, or of whether torture can be justified: It's a question of whether the United States will enforce its own laws.

Phil Carter's Intel Dump has a must-read article on the DoD memo.

- Posted by Scott Forbes at 11:12 am. comments.

Tuesday, 08 June 2004

For reference. U.S. Code, Title 18, Part I, Chapter 118, Section 2441:

Sec. 2441. - War crimes

1. Offense. -
   Whoever, whether inside or outside the United States, commits a war crime, in any of the circumstances described in subsection (b), shall be fined under this title or imprisoned for life or any term of years, or both, and if death results to the victim, shall also be subject to the penalty of death.
2. Circumstances. -
   The circumstances referred to in subsection (a) are that the person committing such war crime or the victim of such war crime is a member of the Armed Forces of the United States or a national of the United States (as defined in section 101 of the Immigration and Nationality Act).
3. Definition. -
   As used in this section the term ''war crime'' means any conduct -
   1. defined as a grave breach in any of the international conventions signed at Geneva 12 August 1949, or any protocol to such convention to which the United States is a party;
   2. prohibited by Article 23, 25, 27, or 28 of the Annex to the Hague Convention IV, Respecting the Laws and Customs of War on Land, signed 18 October 1907;
   3. which constitutes a violation of common Article 3 of the international conventions signed at Geneva, 12 August 1949, or any protocol to such convention to which the United States is a party and which deals with non-international armed conflict; or
   4. of a person who, in relation to an armed conflict and contrary to the provisions of the Protocol on Prohibitions or Restrictions on the Use of Mines, Booby-Traps and Other Devices as amended at Geneva on 3 May 1996 (Protocol II as amended on 3 May 1996), when the United States is a party to such Protocol, willfully kills or causes serious injury to civilians.

- Posted by Scott Forbes at 6:44 am. comments.

Tuesday, 08 June 2004

Wellstone watch: Remember, when a cherished political leader dies, and his grieving followers declare their intention to honor his legacy at the ballot box, it's a disgusting, crass, partisan exploitation of what should be a period of mourning.

Just a timely reminder.

- Posted by Scott Forbes at 4:04 am. comments.

Monday, 07 June 2004

A Few Good Men: The Dubya Cut. Here's an alternate ending that didn't make it onto the A Few Good Men DVD:

[The courtroom scene. Colonel JESSEP is on the stand, being grilled by Lieutenant KAFFEE.]

KAFFEE
Your honor, these are the telephone records from Gitmo for August 6th. And these are 14 letters that Santiago wrote in nine months requesting, in fact begging, for a transfer.

[to Jessep]
Upon hearing the news that he was finally getting his transfer, Santiago was so excited, that do you know how many people he called? Zero. Nobody. Not one call to his parents saying he was coming home.

Not one call to a friend saying can you pick me up at the airport.

He was asleep in his bed at midnight, and according to you he was getting on a plane in six hours, yet everything he owned was hanging neatly in his closet and folded neatly in his footlocker.

You were leaving for one day and you packed a bag and made three phone calls. Santiago was leaving for the rest of his life, and he hadn't called a soul and he hadn't packed a thing.

Can you explain that?

The fact is there was no transfer order. Santiago wasn't going anywhere, isn't that right, Colonel.

ROSS
Object. Your Honor, it's obvious that Lt. Kaffee's intention this morning is to smear a high ranking marine officer in the desperate hope that the mere appearance of impropriety will win him points with the jury.

It's my recommendation, sir, that Lt. Kaffee receive an official reprimand from the bench, and that the witness be excused with the Court's deepest apologies.

[Judge Randolph ponders this a moment.]

RANDOLPH
Sustained. MPs, take Lt. Kaffee into custody.

KAFFEE
What? But he— [points to Jessep, as the MPs sieze him]

RANDOLPH
You're to be held in contempt. Col. Jessup, this court apologizes for Lt. Kaffee's misguided effort to besmirch your reputation.

JESSEP [smirking]
Thank you, your honor. It's a shame that a couple of bad apples like Dawson and Downey did this terrible thing. Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm getting on a plane and going back to my base.

[Jessep stands up and leaves the witness box]

KAFFEE [shouting as the MPs restrain him]
You ordered the Code Red, Jessep! I want the truth!

JESSEP [quietly, under his breath]
You're goddam right I did.

[aloud, over his shoulder as he walks out]
I have neither the time nor the inclination to explain myself to a man who rises and sleeps under the blanket of the very freedom I provide, then questions the manner in which I provide it. I did my job, and I'd do it again. Next time I'd prefer that you just said thank you.

[Jessep exits the room.]

KAFFEE [still shouting, as the MPs haul him away]
There was a 2 a.m. flight off the base! Jessep doctored the log books!

ROSS
Your honor, Lt. Kaffee's conspiracy theories are obvious signs of a mental breakdown. In addition to a disciplinary hearing, I recommend a full psychiatric evaluation.

RANDOLPH
So ruled. This court-martial is adjourned.

- Posted by Scott Forbes at 10:30 am. comments.

Sunday, 06 June 2004

Reagan remembered. I was eleven years old when Ronald Reagan became President, and 19 when he retired; I have fuzzy memories of the Carter years, and exactly one memory of Gerald Ford (for some reason a campaign commercial of his left an impression on my six-year-old mind), but it was Reagan who my developing brain latched onto as the template for what a "President of the United States" looked like.

In some ways I still think of Reagan as the last Real President, in the "real men don't eat quiche" sense (another mark of growing up in the Eighties): Real Presidents know how to deliver a speech and make it sound like something out of a movie. Real Presidents have charisma and a gently self-depreciating sense of humor.

Take this photo, for example. The story behind it, as I remember, is that Reagan was the speaker at a dinner for the press — it may have been the annual White House Correspondents' Dinner, but don't hold me to that — and all the photographers were eating and had put their cameras on the floor (or left them at home). Reagan said something like "I've always wanted to do this," stuck his hands in his ears, and waggled his tongue; only one photographer had the presence of mind to dive for his camera and get the shot, while everybody else just laughed.

Reagan could get away with that. None of the Presidents since him could: Dubya takes himself too seriously, Clinton was more of a back-slapper, and the elder Bush never connected with audiences. None of them had the cheerful charm that Reagan brought to the office, and whether you loved Reagan's policies or hated them, you had to admire his touch. The Gingriches and the Dubyas, the lesser men who've tried to claim Reagan's mantle, have lost the best of what Reagan had to offer: Reagan could bridge the gap between parties and inspire all Americans with his vision of a shining city on a hill. His successors, diminished in stature, present their opponents with more hate than hope.

I'm not much for the latter-day GOP effort to canonize Reagan as their partisan saint, and there are at least two men named Roosevelt (and probably one named Truman) who I'd put ahead of Reagan on the list of the Twentieth Century's greatest Presidents. What I will say, though, is that Reagan had the courage of his convictions: When Reagan wanted tax cuts for the rich, he at least had the moral integrity to argue for tax cuts for the rich. Supply-side economics may have been smoke and mirrors, but at least Reagan didn't lie outright about how much of a cut the top 1% were getting.

I've already said my peace about Reagan's contribution to the Cold War; I think he left a good legacy, an admirable legacy — but he didn't single-handedly stare down the Soviets, as his hagiographers would have us believe. Reagan deserves better treatment than the crassly partisan efforts to idolize him; we should remember that Reagan embraced proposals to eliminate all nuclear weapons, which put him out of step (then and now) with the hardliners in his own party.

Reagan's legacy belongs to us all, and we all join in mourning his passing.

- Posted by Scott Forbes at 1:36 pm. comments.

Sunday, 06 June 2004

Serious Sam, part II: Charlie Cook at the National Journal makes the case for Sam Nunn, the man who should be Kerry's VP pick. I don't think it's likely to happen, but I'll stand up and cheer if it does.

- Posted by Scott Forbes at 10:46 am. comments.

Friday, 04 June 2004

October surprise? Australia may follow Spain's lead and depart the "Coalition of the Willing" later this year, depending on the timing and outcome of Aussie elections. For the benefit of my American readers, here's a quick summary of the Australian political scene. (My perspective on things Australian is not necessarily the most accurate, of course, but I can at least describe what I know of the two countries.)

Australia's political system is similar to the United Kingdom's: Political parties elect their leaders, and the Prime Minister is the leader of the party (or coalition) with a majority of seats in the lower house of Parliament. Oz's two major parties are the Liberal Party and the Australian Labor Party; there are also several smaller parties, which — unlike their American counterparts — are large enough to deny any one party a majority.

The so-called "Liberals" are Oz's social conservatives; on the American political scale, they'd measure somewhere on the respectable side of the GOP. (The "respectable side" being people like John McCain and Richard Lugar, as opposed to the scorched-earth fanatics.) The Liberals been in power since 1996, and their leader John Howard is currently Prime Minister.

As the name implies, Labor is the party of trade unions and stronger social safety nets; at one point they were genuine socialists, but the party platform has mellowed over the decades. Their current leader is Mark Latham, who recently described George W. Bush as "the most incompetent and dangerous president in living memory" and has pledged to have Australia's Iraq contingent home by Christmas.

These two parties have about 65-70 seats each in Australia's House of Representatives, which has a total membership of 150. (They also have about 30 Senators each, out of a total of 76, but it's the House that chooses the Prime Minister.) The rural-conservative National Party holds another 13 seats, and partners with the Liberals for a voting majority; the Green Party has a single House seat, and the remaining three seats are held by independents.

Labor can (probably) count on the Greens to support them if the need arises, and one of the three independents might back a Labor government — which means the Labor Party needs to gain at least eleven seats in the upcoming election to oust John Howard and make Latham the Prime Minister.

At the moment Latham is leading Howard in the polls, in no small part because of the situation on the ground in Iraq… but, because of the way the Australian system works, Aussies don't vote directly for Latham or Howard. Australia's next Prime Minister will be determined by the outcome of 150 separate local elections, not by a direct contest: It's as though Dennis Hastert were President, by virtue of being House Majority Leader, and Nancy Pelosi was the challenger.

I don't know enough about local Australian politics to say whether Labor has a chance of picking up twelve or more seats, but I suspect the race is going to be tighter than the Liberals would have liked. John Howard is answering some tough questions this month about the Red Cross reports out of Abu Ghraib, when Australia learned that their coalition partner was torturing Iraqis, whether the Australians being held at Guantanamo Bay are also being tortured, and so forth. He's also not gaining any points from the current state of affais in Iraq.

The timing of Australia's elections is tricky, though: It's entirely up to Howard, who can call them (on one month's notice) at any time between now and April 2005. The PM is widely expected to call the election in October or November, and will likely try to time it for his own maximum advantage; if he holds the election in October, the outcome — and the implications for Australia's 800 troops in Iraq — will be known before Americans go to the polls.

- Posted by Scott Forbes at 3:07 pm. comments.

Thursday, 03 June 2004

The W Files. Following in the footsteps of The Iraq War: A Play in One Act (link via lies.com, and curse you all for posting your idea first!), I'm thinking about creating a TV series. It would star two FBI agents, Deana Skeptic and Fox Wingnut, and their assignment would be to look for evidence supporting the Bush administration's claims.

One week the agents would be in Prague, investigating a tip that a 9/11 hijacker met with an Iraqi agent; the next they'd be at Abu Ghraib, checking to see if the prison atrocities were the work of a few bad apples; and so on. One agent would be deeply skeptical about Bush's claims, and the other would swallow them hook, line and sinker.

The difference between my show and "The X Files" would be that, week after week, Deana would be absolutely right and Fox would have egg on his face. Each and every claim gets proven false by Agent Skeptic, but for some reason Agent Wingnut never detects the pattern… in fact, he continues to believe the claims are true even after they've been shown to be false.

Also, in spite of a remarkable zero-for-infinity track record, Fox starts each new investigation with an unshakable blind faith in the veracity of the Bush administration: He'll be sort of like Charlie Brown trying to kick the football, except that our national security will be at stake.

I might even have different guest stars playing the part of Agent Wingnut every week, with each one introducing a different wild-eyed premise: I want to believe Richard Clarke committed perjury, say, or I want to believe Saddam was behind 9/11. The WMDs are out there.

Whaddya think?

- Posted by Scott Forbes at 9:38 am. comments.

Thursday, 03 June 2004

Photo caption contest.

"Not to worry. I have everything under control."

Leave your suggestion in the comments. First prize is a new President.

- Posted by Scott Forbes at 1:45 am. comments.

Thursday, 03 June 2004

Valerie Plame watch. Daily Kos diarist GDoyle notes a new development in the ongoing effort to find and prosecute the White House leaker who blew a CIA field agent's cover:

President Bush has consulted an outside lawyer in case he needs to retain him in the grand jury investigation of who leaked the name of a covert CIA operative last year, the White House said Wednesday.

As I've noted before, blowing a CIA agent's cover is a felony — and there's no getting around the fact that Valerie Plame's cover was blown. And, as Josh Marshall notes, the same inner circle of neocons is also under investigation for leaking classified information to Ahmed Chalabi (who promptly turned around and told the Iranians we'd broken their codes).

I'm not fond of the criminalization of politics — of people using the criminal justice system to achieve partisan political goals — but the litmus test here is that I'm prepared to indict a Democrat if the trail leads to one. You don't risk the lives of our agents and troops for personal political gain.

- Posted by Scott Forbes at 1:34 am. comments.

Monday, 31 May 2004

Stockholm, Sweden: In 1625, in the middle of the Thirty Years War, Sweden's King Gustav II Adolf ordered his shipyards to build the Vasa. A warship fiercer than any that had ever sailed the Baltic, the Vasa was to be the pride of the Swedish navy; she was Sweden's first attempt to build a ship with two full decks of cannon, and during construction the King decreed that the cannons would be of a heavier caliber than the original design.

The King's orders were carried out to the letter, of course, and three years later the Vasa was completed to his exact royal requirements. (In other circumstances a bold engineer might have whispered something in the King's ear about the laws of physics, but His Majesty was in Poland prosecuting the war at the time, which made communication difficult.) And so the mighty Vasa sailed into history… as the most ridiculously top-heavy ship ever constructed. She had all the balance of a bicyclist carrying an anvil, and her maiden voyage lasted about an hour before the inevitable happened: The ordinary rocking of ocean waves was enough to capsize the Vasa, and the pride of the Swedish navy promptly sank to a watery grave.

Now, when a wooden ship sinks it usually provides an excellent meal for the shipworm, a saltwater creature that feasts on timber—but the Baltic Sea is not very salty, and so the shipworm doesn't live there. The ship's hull remained intact, sitting peacefully on the ocean floor… but 17th century technology wasn't up to the challenge of raising it. Swedish divers in primitive diving bells did manage to recover the ship's cannons, but that was the most they could achieve; sometime after their exploits in the mid 1660s, the ship's location was lost to history.

The Vasa then sat undisturbed for almost 300 years, until some enterprising Swede with a homemade core sampler went looking for her. In 1956 Anders Franzén found the ship, and five years later the Swedish government carefully floated her to the surface, pumped out all the mud and sea water, and towed her into a museum. Among the wreckage the Swedes found everything from personal effects to the ship's sails, still neatly folded in their storerooms; the ship yielded up a treasure trove of historical artifacts, although it held no actual treasure—save for one gold ring, believed to be the admiral's.

Thus the Vasa became the only actual 17th century sailing ship to survive into the 21st, and a major tourist attraction for Stockholm. The specially constructed museum keeps the ship in constant temperature, high humidity—and low light, which makes photography a challenge. The ship is too big to illuminate with a flash, so I turned it off and took blurry photos; thanks to the digital camera I took 200 blurry photos, some of which (shown here) were less blurry than others.

Posted on November 20th. I'm trying to catch up to the present here, as you can see, but it's also my first week back in the office, my first week to play with the new computer, and lots of other busy stuff.

- Posted by Scott Forbes at 1:55 am. comments.

Monday, 31 May 2004

Without representation: I've always believed that the least effective advocate is the one who calls for something that benefits himself. Whether it's the college student who says tuition is too high, the record-label executive who wants longer copyrights, Jesse Jackson, or the wealthy aristocrat who decries the estate tax… when the premise of your argument is "let's all agree on something that benefits me," your credibility goes down the drain.

So when I learned today that the Senate voted to raise taxes on expats to pay for Dubya's cherished tax cut on stock dividends, I took a deep breath. I'm one of those crazy people who thinks paying taxes is a patriotic duty; it's not an especially pleasant duty, but nonetheless I look at it through JFK's "ask not what your country can do for you" prism. If one-third of my paycheck is what it takes to keep my country safe and sound, then here's my share, and God Bless America. I may grumble like everyone else when I'm signing over the check, and I'll surely raise heck when I find out the gubmint spent my money on million-dollar hammers and junkets to Hawaii—but I won't argue that I'm paying too much, because I've been to Cambodia, and I've come back here to tell you the United States Government is the best damn bargain your tax money can buy.

But I know first-hand about taxes and expats. I thought my tax returns were baroque and confusing before I left the United States, but for the past three years the governments of Australia, New Zealand and America have made it legally impossible for me to exist, much less determine how much I owe them in taxes. Entire consulting firms pore over my tax documents like gypsies reading a Tarot deck. I don't even dare to dream anymore of the carefree days when I could prepare my own return.

As it happens, the United States is one of only a handful of countries in the world that taxes its citizens no matter where they live. (Depending on who you ask, the others are North Korea, the Philippines, Ethiopia, Egypt, or some combination thereof.) If you're a Canadian citizen and you go off to work in Brazil, you only have to pay Brazilian taxes; the Canadian government doesn't follow you. Likewise if you're a Russian in Indonesia, or a Norwegian working in America: You only pay the taxes of the country that you're living in. You don't pay taxes to fund Canadian government services, and then pay another set of taxes for the same services in Brazil.

There is, one must admit, a certain logic to this situation—unless, unfortunately, you're an American. An American abroad has the special joy of seeing tax dollars fly out of his pocket and do almost nothing for him: My taxes, the ones I send to America, are spent on courts and police and armies that I can't call upon to protect me. My tax dollars are put to work in hospitals I can't use, schools I can't attend, highways I can't drive, benefits I can't collect, fire trucks that won't come to my house. At most my tax dollars go to a consulate building somewhere nearby that I can call if I lose my passport or get arrested; imagine how you'd feel if you paid your taxes and got only the Department of Motor Vehicles in return.

So I know this issue first-hand. And, as it happens, this tax increase will not affect me directly, because Australian tax rates are even higher than American ones, and the "foreign tax credit" is still in effect: Instead of paying one-third of my paycheck to America, I pay one-half to the Australian government— which the IRS, in an uncharacteristic display of mercy, credits against what I owe. So I wouldn't see a tax increase under the proposed new rules; the people who would be affected are the Americans who just got bombed in Saudi Arabia, where there's no income tax, or the ones in Hong Kong or Kenya or other places where the taxes are lower than in America. Until now, the federal goverment waived tax liabilities on the first $80,000 of income for those people, which meant bluntly that they paid about $30,000 less in taxes in exchange for giving up the legal protections, civil rights, health, safety, security, and all the other taken-for-granted benefits of being an American citizen, with the added bonus that many locals in these countries think killing an American would make a grand political statement.

What this will do to me, indirectly, is fire all of my colleagues in those danger-pay countries. For most expats the company is paying all or part of their taxes, as part of the package deal that convinced them to go overseas in the first place—which means the company will see a potential $30K increase in the cost of keeping Americans out in the field, which means that suddenly the local talent is looking that much more attractive. It'll be good for the Saudis or the Chinese or the Kenyans, because it'll open up jobs for them to fill… but my expat counterparts will likely end up on the unemployment line back in America: With the economy as it is, they'll have to scramble to find jobs back in the States.

For American companies in undeveloped nations where there's no "local talent" to speak of, or even in developed countries where a given skill is in high demand, this is a tax increase that will penalize those companies for hiring Americans. For Americans working independently in third-world countries, it's a surprise tax burden that will make it difficult or impossible for them to continue. For some it will mean tax evasion (since the wages you're paid abroad are not reported to the IRS, compliance is truly voluntary); for some it means "taxation without representation" and renouncing their American citizenship. I'd like to think that, if I weren't an expat but had all the facts at my disposal, I'd still be strongly opposed to this tax; if anything I think Americans should be encouraged to travel and live abroad: It makes us healthier as a nation, and I don't think we should penalize and double-tax Americans who go overseas. If that's what Senator Grassley wants, then he's not my kind of Senator; my hope is that he's been misquoted or misinformed, and that this "tax cut" proposal to raise taxes on expats dies in committee.

Thanks to The Gweilo Diaries for spotting this. The Gweilo would immediately owe Uncle Sam an extra $30,000, so his opinions of this bill are expressed a bit more pungently.

- Posted by Scott Forbes at 1:33 am. comments.

Wednesday, 26 May 2004

Well, duh. Walden O'Dell, CEO of a company that makes insecure touchscreen voting machines that lack verifiable paper trails, says that it was a "huge mistake" for him to publicly endorse George W. Bush. O'Dell sent out an invitation to a Bush fundraising party last August, writing "I am committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year."

O'Dell, whose Texas-based Diebold Election Systems Inc. is facing possible criminal charges for violating California election laws, said he had didn't write the letter himself… and pledged that Diebold would not support political parties while it was "in the voting business." (!)

Find out if these machines are in your district, and then have them removed. Seriously.

(This is probably a good time to mention TellAnAmericanToVote.com, a web site for expat Americans who need an absentee ballot — and, as the name implies, a link that you can pass on to your expat American friends. At least when voting from overseas you don't have to worry about rigged machines.)

- Posted by Scott Forbes at 5:12 am. comments.

Monday, 24 May 2004

Serious Sam. Meanwhile, here's the man who should be our Secretary of Defense, if not Kerry's choice for Vice President (link via the DNC's Kicking Ass):

For a president who claims that everything changed after September 11, how can George W. Bush fail to take the gravest threat to national security — a terrorist acquiring fissile nuclear material — seriously?

"What's missing is a sense of urgency," said former senator Sam Nunn (D-Ga.), who heads the nonprofit Nuclear Threat Initiative, which funded the 111-page study. Nunn believes President Bush must focus on removing bureaucratic hurdles and work more pointedly with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

"If one of the great cities of the world goes up in smoke, and you look back on these obstacles, it will make our retroactive rear-view mirror look at September 11th look like a waltz," Nunn said yesterday in an interview. "It would be so obvious that the obstacles should have been overcome by the presidents."

Instead of making up threats that don't exist, the administration ought to be doing something about the real ones. It's time for a president who takes national security seriously.

Nunn, the Democratic co-sponsor of 1991's Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction Program, has been out in front sounding this alarm for over a decade: The former Soviet Union has dozens of storage facilities containing weapons-grade uranium, plutonium, sarin, and other chemical and biological weapons, most of them secured with a chain-link fence and maybe a security guard.

We've spent billions searching for Iraqi WMDs when the world's largest inventory of WMDs is sitting in unsecured warehouses, waiting to see whether America will overcome its own bureaucratic inertia… or whether the terrorists will get there first.

This is one of these issues that, if you have all the facts, will drive you stark raving mad: We have a plan to destroy 68 metric tons of plutonium that would otherwise be at risk of falling into the hands of terrorists — but we've never gotten around to carrying it out, because we're still haggling over insurance issues. As in, who'll pay for the Superfund cleanup if there's an accident in Russia while we're destroying the plutonium.

Hello?

Plutonium! Sixty-eight TONS of plutonium! Why are we wandering around Iraq with tweezers and a magnifying glass when there's — I can't even talk about this without losing it completely, but Sam Nunn can, and for that I thank him. Make Sam our VP. Make him our Secretary of Defense. But, for goodness' sake, listen to him. Get those nukes under lock and key.

- Posted by Scott Forbes at 10:45 pm. comments.

Monday, 24 May 2004

Shooting the messenger. Faced with the growing danger of a well-informed populace, Donald Rumsfeld takes decisive action:

Mobile phones fitted with digital cameras have been banned in United States Army installations in Iraq on orders from Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, The Business newspaper reported on Sunday.

Quoting a Pentagon source, the paper said the US Defence Department believes that some of the damning photos of US soldiers abusing Iraqis at Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad were taken with camera phones.

A year ago we had camera crews with our troops. Why is Rumsfeld still in office?

- Posted by Scott Forbes at 1:06 pm. comments.

Monday, 24 May 2004

That I will bear true faith and allegiance… Donald Sensing, at the end of a long article discussing media bias and pundit bias, declares there are four possible outcomes to the War on Terror — and that your bias, since we're all biased in one way or another, should reflect the outcome you want. The right-wing pundits are playing up Nick Berg's murder, and downplaying the Abu Ghraib scandal, because they love our country and want to see us defeat the terrorists; the "liberal media" and left-wing pundits are still rehashing Abu Ghraib because… they hate America and want the terrorists to win.

This is going to be lengthy, but I want to give that premise the response it deserves.

The slander of the lambs

I've pointed out in Donald's comments that it's not just Abu Ghraib — the claim that Abu Ghraib was an isolated incident, by a few bad apples acting on their own initiative, doesn't pass the smell test — but I want to address a common, deeper problem with Donald's analysis: The belief that the Left hates America.

Part of the reason the liberal left is losing to Fox News in the war of public opinion is that we haven't fought that particular slander fiercely enough. It's absurd to claim that half of Americans hate the United States, but that doesn't matter: If someone in a respectable forum suggests that you hate America, the appropriate response is Don't you ever dare to suggest that I love my country less than you do. Call them on it, and do it immediately.

We need to fight tooth and nail against the left-hates-America crowd, because their poisonous bile is infecting the mainstream… and because many right-wingers are from the Jacksonian school of thought, where the traditional response to an outrageous slur is to invite the speaker to step outside. In that world, failing to protest strongly enough is either a sign of cowardice or a sign of acceptance; I'm not calling for a return to the private duel, but we do need to draw a line between civil debate and fighting words, and then defend that line as though our society depended on it. You have the right to an opinion, the right to free speech, but not the right to slander — not if you want to keep this civil, and I'll assume that civility is something we all value.

The rule of law

Now that we've dealt with that issue, I'm going to talk about the rule of law. And, since the rule of law is a phrase that means different things to different people, I'll start by saying what I think it means.

First, law means a set of rules that applies to everyone equally. Rich or poor, black or white, Sunni or Methodist, American or Iraqi, the law remains the same: If you do X, you get Y. Enforcement is not a question of the offender's faith, family or political party; if (for example) a Democratic president can be compelled to testify under oath, then a Republican president can also be compelled. Establishing the rule of law means setting up a system whereby the overwhelming majority of criminals are caught, tried and punished, and where law-abiding citizens can go about their business without fear of crime or arrest.

Second, the rule of law means that, in virtually all disputes, we appeal to the law as our first and only resort. Where the rule of law is in effect, violence is off the table; we've agreed to put aside our guns and rely on the police and the courts. There are rare situations where you or I might endorse "taking the law into one's own hands" — but these are exceptions, usually involving self-defense against imminent bodily harm, and we investigate such claims for evidence of wrongdoing.

By these definitions, the rule of law is strong throughout the "civilized world" — America, Europe, Japan, et al. — and weak at best throughout the Mideast. Terrorists, by definition, go against the rule of law; in fact, terrorism is best understood as an effort to weaken the rule of law, or to abandon it entirely. By retaliating against those who apply the law, by creating anarchy and reducing faith in the system, and by taunting authorities into trampling the law and giving up their claim to legitimacy, terrorists undermine the fabric of our society in the hopes of destroying and replacing it.

These definitions also make it clearer who our enemies are. We aren't in a war with all of Islam, or even the whole of Islamic fundamentalists, any more than the IRA meant Britain was at war with all Irish Catholics — or any more than a struggle against the Ku Klux Klan could be described as a war against all Southern whites. It's the means, not the ends, that we're fighting against: If religious crazies want to convert us to Islam, that's fine. If they want to go door-to-door with pamphlets, great. If they want to pour millions into a money-losing right-wing newspaper in the nation's capital, we allow that. The fanatics become our mortal enemies only if they take up the tools of terrorism, and only those who take this step deserve to be called our foes.

The double-edged sword

Randolph Bourne once declared that "War is the health of the state" — but for advocates of the rule of law, war is a dangerous practice. It invites chaos and anarchy, and suspends the civil contract in favor of brute survival; the case can be made to justify war, when the alternatives are worse, but war is inherently damaging to the premise that men are ruled by laws.

For that reason, among others, war is our last resort: If there's another way to achieve our goals within the rule of law, then our own self-interest demands we try it first. Saddam Hussein's Iraq was an affront to the very concept of law, with tortures, executions and genocides as the order of the day; the case for war could be made on those grounds, and you could argue that we spent twelve years exhausting the alternatives. Saddam was not going to be dislodged from Iraq by anything short of military force; the question was not whether getting rid of Saddam was desirable — it was — but whether the benefits of deposing Saddam by force outweighed the risks of turning Iraq into New Lebanon.

Western civilization, to its benefit, has made great efforts to civilize war and minimize the 'collateral damage' to our principles. We've established conventions and codes of conduct, put certain weapons (e.g., poison gas) off limits, and we make efforts to limit civilian casualties. We do these things in part because we hope the enemy will reciprocate, but also in part because they show how highly we respect the rule of law. Even in the midst of a war zone, we attempt to establish some rules and enforce them; we have given up some tactics that might bring short-term advantage on the battlefield because we think there's a longer-term gain in renouncing them.

We have also, in this war, sought to establish ourselves as the legitimate (if temporary) sovereign of Iraq, on the basis that we are liberating the Iraqi people from a genocidal tyrant; we're just running things for a little while until we can establish a government of the Iraqi people, or so the theory goes. This too requires that we limit our actions to those a legitimate sovereign would perform — and America established centuries ago that cruel and unusual punishment is out of bounds.

Why Abu Ghraib matters more

Nick Berg's murder was a deplorable act by a band of terrorists. It joins the murder of Daniel Pearl, the 9/11 attacks, the Bali bombings, the USS Cole attack, and many other acts on the list of atrocities for which the terrorists will be made to answer — and we'll all celebrate the day when that happens.

The Abu Ghraib scandal was a series of deplorable acts by U.S. soldiers, carrying out orders from senior officers, in support of a policy that came from Donald Rumsfeld's office. If our goal in Iraq is to establish the rule of law there, then Berg's death is a matchstick compared to the raging, burning inferno that Abu Ghraib represents: How can we possibly bring the rule of law with one hand while holding instruments of torture in the other?

Individual terrorist acts are not going to prevent us from establishing a peaceful and secure Iraq. Collectively, if there are enough terrorist attacks, they may lower Iraqi confidence in the rule of law below the breaking point… and Nick Berg's murder is one step in that direction.

Abu Ghraib is an Olympic-class sprint in the direction of destroying whatever faith Iraqis have left in American competence. Not faith in our goodwill, or trust in our motives (though arguably these are up for grabs as well), but a renewed disbelief in American promises — of which the Iraqi people have a long, bitter memory.

The only reason Berg's murder comes up in the same sentence as Abu Ghraib is because of the "blame Americans first" crowd — the right-wing pundits whose constant refrain is that everyone to the left of Paul Wolfowitz is a traitor. The libruls are all worked up about a few frathouse shenanigans in Iraq's prisons, goes the claim, but beheading an American doesn't bother them. Beating an Iraqi prisoner to death is good clean fun for all involved (except perhaps the Iraqi, but he was probably a terrorist), but beheading an American prisoner is an act so brutal and savage that the Right questions your patriotism if you're not shaking your fist right now.

It's a moral equivalence (or, rather, a moral unequivalence) that should disgust any decent person, regardless of your political beliefs — as should the transparent lie that the tortures at Abu Ghraib were an isolated incident by low-level soldiers acting on their own initiative. We already know the same tortures were being applied at Gitmo and in Afghanistan, and that they are still going on. We're setting fire to the house at the same time we're trying to build it, and that requires our full attention; the shame isn't that liberals lack compassion (never thought I'd hear that from the right), but that conservatives would use Berg's death as a partisan cudgel, to distract attention from their incompetence.

A "bias for reformist impulses", indeed

Donald Sensing says there are "only four basic outcomes of this war", which I'll summarize as follows: Democratic reform in the Mideast (and, with it, an end to the terrorist threat); restoration of the Islamic caliphate; Armageddon; or stalemate.

No one, left or right, is wishing for Armageddon; no Americans would want a pan-Arab nation hostile to Western interests; and stalemate isn't an outcome we'd pursue unless the only alternatives are defeat and Armageddon. So we're left with democratic reform as the only serious option… and with the oft-repeated false dichotomy: You're with us, or with the terrorists.

The real question isn't whether we support democratic reform: The question is how we support it. If you don't care what the international lawyers say, because you're going to kick some ass… then you might not be in a good position to engender respect for the rule of law. If you're criticizing the media because they keep bringing up Abu Ghraib, then you're probably not ready to sell the Arabs on a free press. And so on.

Winning this war will take a long time, and it will require that we stick to our principles — including the ones about cruel and unusual punishments. The moral choice isn't between the goals of the West or the goals of the terrorists; the choice is between standing up for American principles… or for voting to continue to cast them aside.

- Posted by Scott Forbes at 12:21 am. comments.

Monday, 24 May 2004

Signs of the apocalypse: Hordes of locusts… check.

Sun darkened… check.

False messiah… check.

David Hasselhoff is becoming a hip-hop rapper… check.

Yep, we're doomed. (But why haven't the neocons ascended to heaven yet?)

- Posted by Scott Forbes at 12:16 am. comments.

Sunday, 23 May 2004

Voices of Reason. I don't think putting John McCain on the ticket would be good for the Democratic party — I think we can win without him, and there are plenty of Democrats who could fill the VP role — but how can I deny a man who says this about deficit spending?

McCain gave a speech Wednesday to the Progressive Policy Institute calling for sacrifice during time of war.

"From pork-barrel spending to expanding entitlements to tax cuts for the wealthiest citizens, both parties have proven who they are working for and it's not the American taxpayer," McCain said. "My friends, we are at war. Throughout our history, wartime has been a time of sacrifice."

That provoked House Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., to question the senator's Republican credentials. Then he went a step further and questioned the patriotism of the decorated veteran who spent five years as a prisoner of war in Vietnam by suggesting he visit the wounded troops from Iraq and Afghanistan at military hospitals.

"If you want to see sacrifice, John McCain ought to visit our young men and women at Walter Reed and Bethesda," Hastert said. "There's the sacrifice in this country."

McCain fired back with his own definition of being a Republican.

"I fondly remember a time when real Republicans stood for fiscal responsibility," he said. "Apparently, those days are long gone for some in our party."

McCain and three other moderate Republicans (that rarest of endangered species) are holding the fiscal line against Bush's proposed budget, which proposes a $367 billion deficit and up to $55 billion in tax cuts. I've said before that deficits are the only way to make me a single-issue voter — and McCain's stance is music to my ears.

The Washington Post got it right today when they said McCain was "perhaps the most popular Republican legislator in the country, except among Republican legislators" — if the GOP had nominated McCain in 2000 instead of a one-term wonder like Dubya, they'd be riding his coat-tails to re-election right now.

- Posted by Scott Forbes at 1:29 pm. comments.

Friday, 21 May 2004

The Reagan Myth. Retired general and ex-presidential candidate Wesley Clark makes the case (link via Talking Points Memo) that Bush's Iraq policy failed because the neocons drew the wrong lesson from the Cold War's endgame: They believed that Ronald Reagan alone was responsible for the fall of the Soviet Union, and that the keys to his success were the "Evil Empire" speech and aggressive use of the military.

And so Bush delivered his "Axis of Evil" speech, invaded Iraq, and waited for the wave of democratic reform to make its way across the Mideast… just as it did in Eastern Europe in the Nineties. No further action was thought necessary to topple the dominoes — just denounce the countries, wave the sword, and voila! You've got democracy.

Clark describes it as "an almost unprecedented geostrategic blunder," and cites American diplomat George Kennan, author of the legendary 1946 "Long Telegram" that predicted the next half-century of U.S.-Soviet relations. Kennan, who turned 100 last February, said this of the Iraq war in 2002:

Anyone who has ever studied the history of American diplomacy, especially military diplomacy, knows that you might start in a war with certain things on your mind as a purpose of what you are doing, but in the end, you found yourself fighting for entirely different things that you had never thought of before. In other words, war has a momentum of its own and it carries you away from all thoughtful intentions when you get into it. Today, if we went into Iraq, like the president would like us to do, you know where you begin. You never know where you are going to end.

In the Long Telegram, Kennan argued that Soviet power "bears within it the seeds of its own decay," and that "no mystical, Messianic movement […] can face frustration indefinitely without eventually adjusting itself in one way or another to the logic of that state of affairs." In his view, Communism was destined to fail because it promised utopia and couldn't deliver one; the key to defeating them was to disprove their ideologies, to foster the belief that America and democracy were the way forward, while preventing the Soviets from expanding their sphere of influence.

In other words, Reagan's "morning in America" and his "shining city on a hill" speeches were at least as important as his "evil empire" sound bites… and his military buildup wouldn't have ended Communism without the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan, the Apollo missions and the Helsinki Accords to back it up. It was our conduct and our character that made us the leaders of the free world: Other nations didn't follow us because they feared our guns, but because they admired the example we set.

Apparently the neocons learned a different lesson.

- Posted by Scott Forbes at 2:39 am. comments.

Tuesday, 18 May 2004

The hollow men. Fester at Fester's Place beat me to this by a few hours, but he and I had the same "eating the seed corn" reaction to this news: Bush is purportedly drawing up plans to deploy the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment — the regiment permanently stationed at the National Training Center, and by all accounts deliverers of the most effective combat training that any army has ever received — to Iraq.

Bush is hollowing out the United States Army. Whether by conscious choice or by the path of least resistance, he is effectively abandoning South Korea: If a million starving North Korean conscripts start massing along the 38th parallel, we no longer have the resources even on paper to mount a conventional repsonse. But mothballing the National Training Center is worse than even that: It would do long-term damage to the efficiency of our combat troops.

The Bush administration's track record is one of military success and political failure: Of political leaders failing to capitalize on military triumphs, and of questionable orders from the top that have led us to chaos and disgrace. Bush's team, not our armed forces, was responsible for planning to keep the peace with only 130,000 troops, for disbanding the Iraqi army, for creating a powerless Iraqi government and then discrediting it, and for creating conditions at Gitmo and Abu Ghraib that encouraged (if not ordered) American soldiers to violate the Geneva Convention. Sending OPFOR to Iraq would be another sign of desperation from an administration whose post-war Iraq plans have exploded in all our faces — and a sign that Bush's regard for our soldiers, and our long-term security, is held hostage to his election plans.

- Posted by Scott Forbes at 11:51 pm. comments.

Tuesday, 18 May 2004

A "no-torture" zone? Gen. Ricardo Sanchez announces that (ahem) "certain prisoner interrogation techniques" will no longer be used in Iraq. From now on, prisoners that we intend to torture will be flown to Guantanamo Bay first.

It would have taken all of thirty seconds for Donald Rumsfeld to announce a military-wide ban on interrogation techniques that violate the Geneva Convention… but, once again, Rummy drops the ball. Bush should have accepted his resignation months ago (along with his neocon deputies) and put in a team that could win the peace; instead, domestic political concerns and the Abu Ghraib scandal have tied Dubya's hands.

If Bush fires Rummy (or "accepts his resignation"), he'll look weak and indecisive, which would fatally damage his election hopes. If he keeps Rummy, he's unable to distance himself from a disgraceful policy of torture — which would also damage his election hopes and wreak havoc on our ability to promote democracy in Iraq and elsewhere.

Either way, it's the end of the line for George W. Bush — and, if the GOP ties their fortunes too tightly to his, it'll be the last time we see a Republican in the White House for years and years to come.

---

Update: In the comments, Sean Riley asks:

If it is /not/ the end for Bush, if he is re-elected, then what the hell does this bespeak of America? Has Sept. 11 and the threat of terrorism truly shaken the spirit of liberty, democracy and human rights that used to found the nation's core?

America's current system of government has endured for 215 years. Our Constitution and our Bill of Rights have proven both strong and adaptable, and have sustained us through civil wars, economic collapses, societal changes, and constitutional crises far worse than the scandal now unfolding in Washington.

But for twelve years now, if not longer, right-wing extremists have been eating away at the glue that holds our society together. With one hand they've sought to make our Constitution rigid and inflexible, when it suits their goals; with the other they've worked to undermine the rule of law itself. One law for thee, another for me: Clinton deserves impeachment for lying under oath, but Rumsfeld deserves to stay in office after doing the same. (And Dubya is allowed to refuse to testify under oath, an option which the GOP warned Clinton would lead directly to his impeachment.)

Bush and the neocons would prefer that we focus on the external enemy, on the threat of terrorism from Islamic fundamentalists, and ignore the men behind the curtain who are desecrating the First, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth and Eighth Amendments. If Bush succeeds and wins the election, he gets four more years to continue his work — and then we get to see whether the Bill of Rights can survive that much punishment.

If we had to, I think America could endure four more years of George W. Bush… though I suspect we'd no longer be a world power by the time he was done. Four more years of half-a-trillion deficits and China will be holding our purse strings; we'd still have (some of) our military strength, but our economic might would be fragile and our global leadership would be long gone.

But I'm optimistic. I'm optimistic that Bush will lose the 2004 election, for one: His coalition is splintering, and good people are fleeing it. If anything, I think the danger is not that Bush will be (re-)elected, but that we'll relax and lower our guard once he's out; the pillars of our society — the rule of law, the concept of limited government, the separation of church and state, and the duty of the government (and the "fourth estate") to keep the public well informed — will still be under attack, and we've only just begun to recognize that and to mount a defense.

- Posted by Scott Forbes at 11:25 am. comments.

Friday, 14 May 2004

The Princess Bride. Today's top story in Australia is the royal wedding of Denmark's Crown Prince Frederik to one Mary Donaldson, formerly of Tasmania — who, in a matter of moments, will become the first Australian ever to marry into royalty.

The couple met in a local bar four years ago, during the Sydney Olympics (the bar, delighted by all the publicity, is now serving free drinks to anyone with a Danish passport), and they courted in secret for a year or two before announcing their engagement. People across Australia are staying up past midnight to see the wedding on live television; people from across Denmark are lining the streets of Copenhagen, waving Australian flags and cheering their new princess.

It's probably the biggest day ever for Danish-Australian relations, and certainly the best news we've had here all week. Congratulations to the happy couple.

- Posted by Scott Forbes at 2:16 pm. comments.

Tuesday, 11 May 2004

Connecting the dots. An insighftul commenter at Billmon's Whiskey Bar raised this question, and the more I think about it the more I wonder.

On September 10, 2003, Army chaplain Capt. James Yee was arrested in Jacksonville, Florida as he arrived back in the United States from Guantanamo. Federal agents said they found Yee carrying "sketches of the military prison."

On October 10, he was charged with two violations of the Uniform Code of Military Justice: Taking classified material to his home, and wrongfully transporting the material without proper security containers or covers.

On November 26, Yee was further charged with adultery with an unspecified woman at Guantanamo and with storing pornography on a government-issued computer in Cuba.

On March 20, 2004, the Army dropped all charges, citing "national security concerns that would arise from the release of the evidence." Maj. Gen. Geoffrey D. Miller — the man who is now in command at Abu Ghraib — made the decision to drop the charges.

On April 6, the Army handed Yee a gag order, preventing him from speaking publicly about the case.

Now, I don't have any basis to prove it — but here's a theory that fits the facts: Yee's "sketches" and "pornography", the evidence whose release created national security concerns, were images of Gitmo detainess being abused.

Perhaps the greatest collateral damage of all is that I can't dismiss that theory.

- Posted by Scott Forbes at 7:43 pm. comments.

Thursday, 06 May 2004

Collateral Damage, part II: Last month the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Rasul v. Bush and al-Odah v. United States, both involving detainees at Guantanamo Bay and whether they have any legal rights whatsoever.

The Court's verdict will likely be announced in June… right in the middle of the ongoing investigation into abuses committed by U.S. soldiers at Abu Ghraib.

No matter what the verdict, it's a black eye for the Bush administration: If the Court rules against Bush (as it should), it's a political defeat; if it rules in Bush's favor, then the Court looks foolishly naïve and partisan — again — which will energize Kerry's base.

- Posted by Scott Forbes at 1:22 am. comments.

Thursday, 06 May 2004

Collateral Damage, part I:

They are torturing people. They are torturing people on Guantanamo Bay. They are subjecting them to cruel and unnecessary treatment. And people sometimes argue about the definition of torture. What they're doing clearly comes within the definition of torture under the convention, under the international convention, but it also… they are engaging in acts which amount to torture in the medieval sense of the phrase. They are engaging in good old-fashioned torture, as people would have understood it in the Dark Ages.

— Richard Bourke, lawyer for Australian Guantanamo detainee David Hicks, October 8, 2003 (emphasis mine).

Q: Well, what about the suggestion from your critics that while you won the war, the peace is being bungled?

THE PRESIDENT: They're wrong. We're making great progress in Iraq. We've got a pretty steep hill to climb. After all, one, we're facing a bunch of terrorists who can't stand freedom. These thugs were in power for awhile, and now they're not going to be in power anymore, and they don't like it. And they're willing to kill innocent people. Their terrorist activities … we'd rather fight them there than here.

And secondly, that life is pretty darn good compared to what it was under Saddam Hussein. People aren't going to be tortured; they're not going to be raped; they're not going to mutilated; there are not going to be mass graves. And plus, that the infrastructure is improving. I talked to our Secretary of Commerce today. His exact … he's in Baghdad. He said, look, he said, Mr. President, he said, you're not going to believe the world here is a lot different than some in America think it is. There's a burgeoning marketplace. He met with women business owners. I mean, there's excitement there about a free society emerging. And it's in our interests that this society be free.

Q: Sir, there are two Australian citizens being held in Guantanamo Bay.

THE PRESIDENT: Yes.

Q: What's going to happen to them? And what do you say to people in Australia who think they should be either charged or released?

THE PRESIDENT: Well, we would be glad to work with the government on the issue. And if John wants to discuss it, I'm more than happy to discuss it. We're working with a variety of countries that have got people in Guantanamo Bay. These are people picked up on the battlefield. We're trying to learn more about them to make sure we fully understand --

Q: Are they being tortured?

THE PRESIDENT: No, of course. We don't torture people in America. And people who make that claim just don't know anything about our country.

— President George W. Bush, October 18, 2003 (emphasis mine).

Sixth, early this … earlier this month, the U.S. Navy inspector general was asked to assess detainee operations at Guantanamo Bay and at Charleston Naval Station brigs. From these investigations thus far, six individuals have been identified for Article 32 criminal hearings. At least six other individuals have been given letters of reprimand. Of these six, two individuals were relieved of their responsibilities.

— Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, May 4, 2004.

- Posted by Scott Forbes at 12:57 am. comments.

Monday, 03 May 2004

Photoblogging. On a much lighter note, I've uploaded the photos from last month's trip to Heron Island, on Australia's Great Barrier Reef, and from an afternoon at Sea World a couple of months ago.

Enjoy!

- Posted by Scott Forbes at 1:46 pm. comments.

Sunday, 02 May 2004

The Rock. Eons ago, Ayers Rock (or "Uluru," as the Aboriginals call it) was the heart of a great mountain. Thousands of years later, wind and rain have eroded that original mountain down to a stub, and there haven't been any new mountains to take its place: Australia is all one big tectonic plate, and it's been millenia since it had anything to push against.

Uluru is a sacred place to the local Aboriginals, but it's also the only tourist concern (in fact, the only anything) for several hundred miles in any direction. The Aboriginals don't like people climbing on their rock (specifically, they don't like people falling to their deaths, which has happened about 35 times over the years), but they also don't want to shut down the one local attraction that brings in tourists. So, the brochures for Uluru take the unusual position of trying to guilt-trip people into not climbing the rock. "Please don't climb," they say. It's permitted, but discouraged. I suspect this was some sort of compromise between the Guardians of Culture and the local chamber of commerce. They also ask you not to photograph Uluru except for private use; I'm not sure where blogging falls on the tribal elders' "private" scale, but I figure no one is reading this anyway, so here goes.

Climbing Ayers Rock is not for the faint of heart: It's strenuous physical activity, and steep besides. You know those signs at Disneyland that say "you must be this tall to go on this ride?" There's a sign at Ayers Rock with my picture, that says "you must be slightly more physically fit than this man." Nothing says "you are carrying ten extra pounds" like an hour-long climb at a 45° angle.

The first part of the climb has an iron chain to help you up; unless you're some kind of mountain gazelle (and if you are, I don't want to know), you'll be using the chain to pull yourself. After stopping to pant like an old man about five times, I eventually made it to the end of the chain, about halfway up; after that the route is marked by a dotted line painted on the rock, and the going gets (slightly) easier.

The collection of rocks off in the distance at right is called "The Olgas," and looks like something you'd find in Utah or New Mexico. It's another old mountain, but this one has eroded into individual (large) boulders. You can see the dotted line off to the left, as it dips into valleys and slopes near the top.

At the top of the rock you will find this majestic trash-can shaped thingy, courtesy of the Australian National Survey. Here's a close-up of the thingy, which has a compass rose on top, and points out various geographical features nearby.

Turning around and walking back down again was much easier than the journey to the top, which was fortunate, because we drank all our water getting there. (Luckily some fellow travelers were willing to sport us a few mouthfuls. Take at least 1.5 liters per person. Also, the park rangers will close the climb if it's too windy or if the temperatures are too high, which usually means the climb is only open for a few hours after sunrise.) I can say with complete confidence that climbing Ayers Rock is one of those things I'm glad I did, but will never, ever, do again.

Later that evening (at sunset) the four of us went on a tour called "Sounds of Silence," which is an outdoor three-course meal delivered in the middle of the Outback. Once the sun went down and the flies went away, we sat down at tables that could easily have come from a fancy restaurant, dined on steak and kangaroo, and then just before the dessert course a local astronomer gave one of the more fascinating dinner speeches I've heard: Using a narrow-beam spotlight, he pointed out the constellations of the Southern Hemisphere, including those of the Zodiac that were visible at that time of the evening, and then brought out telescopes to look at the rings of Saturn and the bands of Jupiter. Very entertaining and educational, and a good meal besides.

All in all, it was an excellent way to spend five days in the middle of Australia. You can see my other photos from the trip here, if you like. After three years of living here, most of it working in Sydney or the Gold Coast, I finally feel like I've seen (part of) the country.

- Posted by Scott Forbes at 8:31 am. comments.

Sunday, 02 May 2004

An open letter: On behalf of the American people, I apologize to the people of Iraq — to the individuals, their families, and their loved ones — who have been humiliated and abused by U.S. soldiers, agents, and contractors under American employ. I promise to see that these barbaric incidents are investigated, prosecuted, and that the responsible parties are punished; that the Iraqi victims of these acts are compensated for the abuse and humiliation they endured; that America's armed forces are held to the highest standards of conduct in their treatment of prisoners and civilians; and that the United States in its words and actions respects the inalienable rights of the Iraqi people.

I believe that hundreds of thousands of men and women have served honorably and decently in our effort to rebuild Iraq, and that these despicable actions are not reflective of the U.S. armed forces as a whole. Nonetheless, these actions are intolerable. Our exercise of authority in Iraq is a temporary measure, a necessary step in restoring sovereignty to the Iraqi people; we are custodians of that sovereignty only because we took from Saddam Hussein that which he had unlawfully stolen. Our duty is clear, and our intent is clear: We will restore the sovereign rights of the people of Iraq, and look forward to the day when the Iraqi people exercise the powers we've fought for them to obtain.

These photographs document crimes against the Iraqi people, and I applaud the media outlets that have exposed them to the light. Some would say the publication of these photos is harmful to our efforts: That it damages America's reputation, and fans the flames of Iraqi extremists who would fight our peacekeeping efforts. I would say that the damage had already been done — not by the people who published these pictures, but by the people who made them. The truth could not be hidden from the victims of these acts. Suppressing the evidence would only avoid our duty to see things made right.

We are fighting a terrorist movement that considers mass murder without moral pause. We are fighting to protect the rights that we hold to be universal: Rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness that we believe are the birthright of all humanity. But we cannot secure these rights for ourselves while denying them to the Iraqi people, and we cannot build a democratic Iraq with the tools of a police state. I condemn and regret these acts of sadistic cruelty, and support all efforts to ensure justice is served.

I'm not really empowered to speak "on behalf of the American people," but somebody needed to say it. Watching Dubya stammer that he "didn't like it one bit" just wasn't good enough.

- Posted by Scott Forbes at 6:57 am. comments.

Sunday, 02 May 2004

Dead man campaigning. Back in January, during the primaries, I asked whether a vote for John Kerry was a vote for the charismatic Kerry, the "bring it on" Kerry who surfaced two weeks before the Iowa caucus… or a vote for the dead-fish Kerry, the mealy-mouthed zombie who lurched around in November and December.

Four months later, many observers (including the Village Voice) have decided we got the zombie — but I'm not sure yet. The book on Kerry is that he rallies down the stretch; he's best when his back's to the wall, and so on. We already know the race is going to be close, and Kerry may be getting more benefit from being a few points behind Bush at this stage: If Bush were ahead, he could claim the "underdog" mantle and use it to rally his base… but Bush has a narrow, insignificant lead, so his base remains distinctly un-rallied.

Some are starting to think that this year's Presidential election will be decided more by events on the ground in Iraq than by the actions of either candidate — but I think that's mostly because neither candidate has done anything, yet, that would overshadow recent events. A policy speech, unless it proposes a radical change of direction, isn't going to crowd Fallujah out of the headlines or replace the photos of U.S. soldiers abusing Iraqi prisoners (in heaven's name, what were these idiots thinking?) on the news reports.

Kerry's choice of a running mate will be the next campaign event that captures the news media's attention, and Kerry's decision will have some impact. (Just not Gephardt. That's all I ask. Edwards is fine. Sam Nunn is fine. Tom Vilsack is "Tom who?", but I'm sure he'll do fine. John McCain is either a Bush nightmare or a Nader opportunity; I can't tell which.) But, for now, the best one can say is that Kerry has avoided the problem of peaking too early.

- Posted by Scott Forbes at 5:06 am. comments.

Thursday, 22 April 2004

Go Ask Alice. The mud puddle at right is the so-called "spring" for which the town of Alice Springs is named. It isn't really a spring: It's just a place where the underground water table happens to be close to the surface. When the surveyors came through this part of Australia in 1871, looking for water sources and a suitable path for the telegraph line, it had rained the previous day and the water level was higher than usual—so the surveyors thought they had discovered an oasis, and they named it after the boss's wife. I think that was the last time it rained here, too.

Here we see Ye Olde Telegraph Station. These buildings were constructed between 1872 and 1905ish, and have been restored to their original condition. The people who lived here were the only whites in the area (at first), and the telegraph line through Alice Springs was Australia's first connection to the outside world, running from Adelaide to Darwin and then from there to Java by undersea cable. The telegraph brought news from Great Britain in a matter of hours, where it had taken two months to arrive by sea.

The first crew to live at the station included a stationmaster, four telegraph operators, a cook, a blacksmith (who was really a jack of all trades), their wives and children, and a teacher/governess. The station was in operation 24/7 and the operators took six-hour shifts. The station also supported two linesmen, but the linesmen didn't live at the station: They each lived 150km up or down the line, and rode out to repair it as needed. When they did return to the station about once a month for supplies, they lived in tents like these. The station itself was re-supplied once a year ("imagine going a year between shopping trips," said our guide), and was largely self-sufficient.

There were seven stationmasters here between 1872 and 1932, when the station moved to the township of Stuart—which promptly decided it liked the name Alice Springs better than it liked Stuart, and so the town renamed itself after the telegraph station. Being a stationmaster was a high-risk profession; something like four of the seven died in office or soon afterwards. At least one of the stationmasters is buried in a small cemetery on the premises.

This was also a first for me: After three years of living in Australia, I've finally seen a wild kangaroo. (How many deer and buffalo do you see on a regular basis?) The small blurry blotch in the middle of this photo is an inland wallaroo, M. robustus erubescens, also known as a "euro." If you look really closely, you may be able to see the baby kangaroo (a "joey") in her pouch.

We also had the pleasure of eating kangaroo (and emu, crocodile, and camel, for good measure) at one of Alice Springs's local restaurants. Kangaroo is in the "tastes like beef" category; I had actually eaten it before—it can be found on some menus in Sydney—but it was a first for my parents. Emu tastes like ostrich, which tastes like beef, and is pretty good. Camel tastes like beef, but has a sort of squishy, slimy texture (it was our least favorite of the four), and crocodile tastes sort of but not quite like chicken.

The next morning we got up painfully early and took a hot-air balloon ride, which I had never done before. This was probably the best way to see kangaroos in the wild; kangaroos are nocturnal animals, so they were hopping off to bed as we were getting up and inflating our balloon. We saw a few stragglers, but they were even further away than the wallaroo above and the photos didn't really turn out well. (Sorry.)

Next: Ayers Rock and the "Sounds of Silence:" Dinner by starlight in the Outback.

- Posted by Scott Forbes at 7:00 am. comments.

Thursday, 22 April 2004

Administrivia. Blogroll updates, RSS feed changes, search engines and more. I've more or less raided the blogroll of (Southern Cross) Words and "borrowed" (ahem) several of his links: Yet another American in Oz, an Aussie in Paris, an expat group blog, and an exciting collection of authentic Aussie blogs.

I discovered Kevin Drum's blog (formerly known as CalPundit) when he became the in-house blogger for Washington Monthly magazine, and since then he's become an indispensable voice of reason from the middle. I've also updated my link to Howard Bashman's How Appealing, since he's now become the in-house blogger for Legal Affairs magazine. (Hmmm. I'm still waiting for the phone call from Highlights for Children inviting me to write their in-house blog, but until then….)

Another new link goes to the Australian chapter of Democrats Abroad, which is on the verge of becoming a real live organization down here. Greg has already blogged about yesterday's meetup, so I'll just say in passing that I've never been this politically active either. (Well, not since college, anyhow. And that was an accident.) Until this election cycle, voting was the full extent of my political activity — but between Howard Dean and the slow-motion train wreck called the Bush administration, I've gotten my act together and started getting involved.

Syndication-wise, you may have noticed that I've switched back to including the full content of the article in my RSS feeds, instead of just the first sentence. As the newsfeed-readers get more sophisticated, they're starting to act more like web browsers than clipping services — so it probably makes less sense than it did a year ago to serve up only part of the article. I've also retired the blog's Tech category and RSS feed; after 18 months of blogging I apparently have very little to say about technology. Or, at least, I have a lot more to say about travel and politics.

And, finally, the search engine that quietly appeared in the sidebar two or three weeks ago is available for your browsing pleasure; if you want to find everything I've written about Ayers Rock, now you can. (It only shows the most recent six articles, though, so you may not be able to dig up everything I've ever written about Iraq or George Bush in one pass.) Enjoy!

- Posted by Scott Forbes at 4:52 am. comments.

Thursday, 22 April 2004

Land of the Flies. Notes for visitors to the Australian Outback: The first thing they don't tell you in the tourist brochures is about the flies. Millions upon millions of houseflies. They'll be trying to land in your ears and nose as soon as you step off the airplane. This is the reason why I'm wearing what looks like an oversized hair net in the photo at right; it's not a question of whether you want to look silly or not, but whether you want to look silly wearing a net on your head or look silly trying to shoo away dozens of flies all day long.

I'm told that the flies are only really a problem during the "off season," which runs from about October to the end of April; apparently the best time to visit the Northern Territory is during its winter (June to August), when daytime temperatures are merely in the 25° C (80° F) range. We were definitely ahead of the season on this trip. The flies go away at night (perhaps they have a pressing engagement elsewhere), so if you retreat to your air-conditioned hotel room during the hottest part of the day, you can enjoy a cooler and relatively fly-free tour in the early morning and late evening. Also, mercifully, there aren't any biting or stinging bugs to speak of — so the problem is limited to preserving your sanity while a team of houseflies attempts to explore your head.

On our first day in Alice Springs, we toured the visitors' centre of the Royal Flying Doctor Service, which provides health care to the isolated communities of inland Australia. (Alice Springs itself has a population of only about 28,000, and this is the large city in central Oz; the town exists mainly to serve as the regional headquarters for a lot of vital services, and to support tourism. It is, as my parents noted, not much larger than the southern Illinois town they departed from.) The R.F.D.S. was the world's first aerial medical service, and it developed (through Alf Traeger) one of the more clever inventions of the 1920s: The Traeger Pedal Radio, a combination typewriter, Morse Code generator, and radio transceiver, all powered by pedaling as you typed.

Tomorrow: Australia's first telecommunications network, a.k.a. the Alice Springs Telegraph Station, and the actual "spring" for which Alice Springs is named.

- Posted by Scott Forbes at 4:43 am. comments.

Wednesday, 21 April 2004

Bushes, Saudis, oil prices, quid pro quo…

Captain Renault: I'm shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here!

[A croupier hands Renault a pile of money]

Croupier: Your winnings, sir.

Captain Renault: [sotto voce] Oh, thank you very much. [aloud] Everybody out at once!

I know we're supposed to pretend that foreigners have no interest in American Presidential elections, and no business in trying to influence the outcome… but who are we kidding? America's choice of leader affects every country from Australia to Zimbabwe; Tom Friedman was right when he said that, for many in the world, the actions of America's government have more impact on their lives than their own government. Of course they care deeply about our elections. You would too.

So I can't say I'm shocked that the Saudis would manipulate oil prices in an effort to tip the election Dubya's way, or that Muqtaba al-Sadr has one eye on the Gallup polls as he incites his followers in Iraq. I suspect that every foreign leader wants to influence the American elections, but most are wise enough to refrain; trying to navigate the American political scene is difficult even for American politicians, much less outsiders. Tony Blair or John Howard could just as easily trigger a backlash, cause an international incident, weaken his own standing at home, etc., if either were to jump in and endorse a candidate.

Where I will draw an ethical line is when an American politician does something to improve his (re-)election chances at the expense of the common good. I'm thinking specifically of Nixon's under-the-table negotiations with North Vietnam during the 1968 elections, sabotaging the Paris peace talks in an attempt to hurt the Democrats' election chances; if there were evidence that Bush had done something like this, and was seeking to lower oil prices only to improve his own fortunes at the ballot box, I'd call that corruption. If he was simply pressuring the Saudis to lower oil prices, independently of the election calendar, I'd say that's within the scope of his duties — short-sighted and irresponsible in terms of energy policy, but not necessarily immoral.

Naturally I expect Team Dubya to tell me that Bush was manipulating oil prices to improve the economy regardless of what his actual motives were, because Team Dubya will lie about anything (see previous article) if it helps their re-election chances.

And, in any case, I suppose it must be reassuring for the Bushies to have at least one foreign leader on their side… seeing as how Kerry has locked up all the others.

- Posted by Scott Forbes at 5:44 am. comments.

Sunday, 18 April 2004

Moment of truth. It was September 12, 2001, and the White House press secretary had just uttered a transparent lie: Bush had spent most of 9/11 flying from one undisclosed location to another, Ari Fleischer claimed, because a specific threat had been lodged against Air Force One.

Fleischer had spoken the truth in his briefing the day before, while en route to the White House on the afternoon of 9/11: Bush spent the day in midair because that's what the playbook says to do. The plan for responding to an attack on Washington, written back in the days of Truman and Eisenhower, starts with getting the President airborne and to (relative) safety; the attack was always assumed to be nuclear, but nonetheless Step One in the federal government's response to any attack on D.C. is to get the President in motion and preserve the National Command Authority.

Nonetheless, Bush or his handlers apparently decided that the truth — that Bush was in hiding for most of the day on 9/11 — might be a bit damaging to the President's image, even though it was the appropriate course of action for the commander in chief. And so, instead of defending the truth, the administration adopted a convenient lie. Air Force One was a target, they proclaimed, in spite of the obvious absurdity: How could a hijacked passenger jet possibly find Air Force One, much less intercept it? Commercial aircraft are not equipped with Top Gun-style radar systems that identify friends and foes — and even if they did identify the plane by sight, they wouldn't be able to catch it without active cooperation from Air Force One's pilot.

The moment I heard this impossible claim, I realized that its source was someone who could never be trusted: If you're willing to lie about something like this, at a time like that, you're willing to lie about anything. Given the choice between admitting an unpleasant truth and inventing a lie to cover it, someone in the Bush Administration instinctively chose the latter; conceding the truth and defending the President's actions would have cost almost nothing, but for this person the lie came quickly and easily.

If this had been an isolated act by one person — if one bad apple had been the culprit — then I'd have been willing to give Bush the benefit of continued doubt. But too many people from within the Bush Administration came forward to confirm the details of a story that was entirely bogus. Fleischer. Rove. Cheney. In a matter of days the truth came out, and it was clear that Bush's press secretary, his senior adviser, and his Vice-President were brazenly lying to the American people.

There was never a threat to Air Force One on 9/11. Senior members of the Bush Administration made up a terrorist threat, for partisan political gain — and if Bush saw anything wrong with that, the silence was deafening.

Before 9/11 Bush's credibility was already thin in my book: His explanations for why millionaires needed tax cuts shifted along with the economy, and his plans for a missile defense sounded great so long as the North Koreans never learned about boats. But it was really on September 12th that I realized that Bush just couldn't be trusted: Not with the economy, not with homeland security, and not with the plain and simple truth.

- Posted by Scott Forbes at 12:44 pm. comments.

Sunday, 18 April 2004

You might as well quit scuba diving now, said the guide, because you'll never have another dive like that one again. It was our first dive in deep water, after a final practice session in the pool, and the Heron Island dive boat took us students (along with 12-15 experienced divers) to a point on the reef called Heron Bommie. We dived to a depth of 12 meters (40 feet) and drifted with the current to Pam's Point; on the next three dives we'd demonstrate the skills we learned in the pool, from removing and replacing our weight belts to performing a controlled emergency ascent — but the first dive was simply a "fun dive," as the instructor put it, to get us used to the gear and the environment.

Large sea animals like sharks and mantas are a relatively rare sight when diving, I'm told — most people will make several dives before they spot anything larger than a big tuna. Diving at the Great Barrier Reef improves those odds, but nonetheless we hit the jackpot on our first time out: Two of the largest mantas anyone had ever seen, one with a wingspan of four meters (13 feet) and the other only slightly smaller; three white-tipped reef sharks, each about a meter and a half (4 to 5 feet); a regular riot of tropical fish, including several we could identify from the Finding Nemo aquarium; and enough coral to build a house. Our instructor, who had been diving for seven years, said that it was the biggest manta she'd ever seen; another diver on the boat said he'd been on 230 dives, and this was his best one yet.

I don't have any pictures of this epic undersea adventure, alas (the instructor sensibly suggested that I learn to dive first, and then struggle to master underwater photography), so you'll have to take my word for it: Heron Island is a great place to learn how to scuba dive. I do have some other photos of the island and the reef, including some taken from the air as we flew to the island (the helicopter ride is highly recommended), which I'll try to get online in the next few days.

- Posted by Scott Forbes at 11:27 am. comments.

Saturday, 10 April 2004

Chickenhawk Down. One more thought before I vamoose: Is the current military action in Fajullah essentially what the right wing believes we should have done in Somalia? Clinton's response to the "Black Hawk Down" incident was to bring our troops home, which right-wing pundits have since decried as a sign of weakness that contributed to the 9/11 attacks; should we have closed the exits from Mogadishu and scoured the city, as Bush's armies are doing now? Does the action in Fajullah appear to be having the desired effect as a deterrent? Is it bringing the perpetrators to justice, and making future terrorist attacks less likely?

Just asking. I'd hate to think that, after all these years and all that criticism, it turns out Clinton's decision to fold was the right one.

- Posted by Scott Forbes at 3:26 pm. comments.

Saturday, 10 April 2004

Sometimes we create a new word because the old words aren't descriptive enough. "Blog" is one example; it's what linguists call a portmanteau, a word formed by combining two existing words. Web plus log becomes blog, just as smoke plus fog becomes smog or binary digit becomes bit. We coined a new word for blogging because the older words didn't fit: "Log" doesn't capture the element of two-way communication, and "web" means a lot of different things.

Sometimes we create a new word because the old words are a little too descriptive. "Ethnic cleansing" sounds like something you'd do during spring cleaning: Scrub the bathroom, mop the kitchen floor, kill that Muslim family down the block, do the laundry.... It sounds so much more pleasant than that nasty older term — "mass murder" — and it gives the casual reader a lot less information about what's really happening.

"Fisking" is a new word coined in the blogosphere. It replaces the older term ad hominem (Latin for "to the man"), and describes a debate where, instead of discussing an idea, one attacks the person who raised the idea. The name originated from an incident in Afghanistan involving one Robert Fisk, an anti-war journalist from the UK, who was attacked and beaten up by Afghan refugees and then commented that, if he had been through the same ordeals as they had, he'd probably want to beat up some Westerners too. The warbloggers lifted up this incident as a prime example of the "blame America first" (or "blame the West first") mentality, and began using Fisk's name as a verb.

Fisking implies that the opposing argument is so stupid and repugnant that the opponent deserves an actual, physical beating, and not just the metaphorical slap that the blogger righteously delivers. It usually involves a writing style where the blogger makes a point-by-point rebuttal of the original article, quoting each paragraph and following it with snide comments addressed personally to the original author. The tone is as sarcastic and condescending as humanly possible; the purpose is not to engage the other person's ideas, but to portray the person as an idiot who is only deserving of ridicule.

Now, changing the name of something doesn't change what it is—ad hominem is still the lazy man's approach to argument, and says that you fear having a real discussion—but from the way the warbloggers rejoice after each new Fisking, you'd think they had discovered a revolutionary new technique for converting the masses. At best a "good Fisking" can be entertaining, in a Jerry Springer-y puncture-the-windbag-with-a-chair sort of way... but most people who try their hand at Fisking end up sounding just as smug and pretentious as the ones they're mocking. (Of course, most people who feel their words are so important that they should be broadcast to the entire online world, and go through the trouble of setting up their own blog just to do so... well, we're pretty opinionated folks to begin with.)

I also find it odd that the people who decry the term "chickenhawk," or who claim to value straight-shooting plain-talking speech and clear meaning, are willing to use the word "Fisking" to describe an ad hominem attack. Next they'll make up a word to describe the actions of the Senate when it exercises its Constitutional authority to reject an ultraconservative judicial nominee. Oh, wait. We did that already.

Update: Found an even better link for "chickenhawk" today, so I used it instead.

- Posted by Scott Forbes at 2:29 pm. comments.

Saturday, 10 April 2004

Under the sea: I'm off for a well-deserved holiday to the Great Barrier Reef, where last week's scuba-diving lessons will be put to good use. (I hope — my lady-love is coming down with a cold, and you can't scuba dive if your ears are blocked.) I'll be gone for a week, so it looks like I'll miss the collapse of the Iraqi Governing Council and the first few hints that Condi Rice committed perjury yesterday. (It really looks like it's going to be that kind of week.)

Next week I'll try to come up with a strategy to get from where we are now to a successful outcome in Iraq… but I'm afraid it's too late to correct the most serious blunder — the disbanding of the Iraqi army — and Dubya simply doesn't have any favors left to call in. At this stage we need 500,000 troops on the ground to restore order, and Bush has no way to get them.

- Posted by Scott Forbes at 1:34 pm. comments.

Friday, 09 April 2004

Riceshomon. I didn't watch Condi Rice's testimony before the 9/11 panel (it aired at about 2 AM local time here in Sydney), so I'm relying on blogs to tell me how it went; so far, after reading most of the usual suspects, I still have no idea. Aside from the delightfully cynical Stuart Benjamin at The Volokh Conspiracy, who prepared a Bingo scorecard with words that partisan pundits would use, I've yet to find a description of Rice's testimony that doesn't sound like mad spin-doctoring.

For the record, my sources for this exercise are (listed roughly in order from far-left to far-right): Daily Kos, Whiskey Bar, Washington Monthly, Daniel Drezner, One Hand Clapping, Instapundit, and USS Clueless. Part of the problem here is that three of my middle four (Billmon, Drum and Drezner) punted this morning, leaving their commenters to battle it out; the remaining pundits' reactions were, shall we say, easier to predict in advance.

On the left side of the spectrum, nearly everyone described Rice as being nervous, hesitant, evasive and insecure. These comments tapered off as you move towards the right, where pundits were more likely to criticize the 9/11 Commission itself (using words like "farce", "ineptitutde", and "partisan jackasses"). The liberals were also much more likely to note that the President's Daily Briefing on August 6, 2001 was titled "Bin Laden determined to attack inside the United States", and that it mentioned the possibility of Al Qaeda hijacking airplanes.

The right was, above all else, pissed off at Bob Kerrey. Already they're warming up the hate machine, preparing to give Kerrey the full treatment: Kerrey joins Richard Clarke, Paul O'Neill, Joe Wilson, the people of Spain, and pretty much everyone who's not already a neocon on the right wing's Official Enemies List. Kerrey's sin was that he directly questioned the wisdom of Bush's war in Iraq, which (as far as the wingnuts are concerned) is the lowest form of high treason — and, more to the point, has very little to do with the mandate of the 9/11 Commission.

It was difficult to find any analysis of the substance of Rice's testimony, especially on the right: Steven Den Beste went straight to ad hominem attacks on family members of 9/11 victims; Instapundit highlighted the back-and-forth between Kerrey and Rice (and made the bizarro observation that Dr. Rice is a black woman — apparently a crack team of wingnuts worked round the clock to unearth that bombshell); and Donald Sensing dismissed the entire proceedings as a farce. One anonymous Instapundit reader claimed "if Dr Rice didn't refute nearly everything Dick Clarke said, I was clearly asleep for 3 hours", but offered nothing further to back up this bold assertion.

Daily Kos contributor DHinMI was really the only one to step forward and offer substantive analysis of Rice's testimony. Not surprisingly, he observed that Rice was "not forthcoming about actions and decisions," that Rice spent more time challenging the questions than she spent answering them, and that she didn't accept responsibility for failing to prevent 9/11. DHinMI also compared Rice's testimony with Clarke's, contrasting the relative candor of both officials and noting how each addressed structural problems.

Overall I get the impression that Rice's testimony didn't do much to restore the Bush administration's credibility, compared to the impact that officials like Richard Clarke and David Kay have had in recent weeks. Partisans on both sides are unswayed by her comments, centrists are still harboring the same doubts that they had the week before — and events on the ground in Iraq will have more impact on public opinion than anything Rice said today.

- Posted by Scott Forbes at 1:49 pm. comments.

Thursday, 08 April 2004

Small world. (Southern Cross) Words is another blog by an American expat in Sydney; the author discovered my blog earlier today, and is apparently browsing my archives right now to find out more about me.

Reading his blog, though, I've realized that he's in for a surprise: We've met. We both attended the Democrats Abroad caucus in February, where I spoke on Howard Dean's behalf; I think we even spoke to each other briefly, just after the caucus.

What are the odds?

Update: There's more! Web-goddess and gadgetgirl have now popped out of the woodwork, making a total of four American expats blogging away here in Sydney. I'm happily updating my list of expat blogs so that you can get four, count 'em, four slices of bloggy goodness from Down Under for your reading and entertainment pleasure.

And yes, to answer Greg's question, I do attend non-Dean Meetups here in Sydney. :-)

- Posted by Scott Forbes at 12:55 pm. comments.

Thursday, 08 April 2004

Plan of attack. I think I've figured out George W. Bush's strategy for promoting peace and stability in Iraq — his plan is elegant in its simplicity, and if we stay the course long enough our success is almost certain.

1. Kill everyone who doesn't want peace.
2. Repeat.

No further planning is necessary. All we need now is a bold leader with the will and the vision to see us through the difficult first step; we're not cutting and running this time, no matter what the liberal pansies say.

Thank goodness we have a strong leader like George W. Bush protecting America and defending our freedoms in this time of crisismmmmghggHAAAAAAAGGHH! What in the name of all that's good and

Sorry. Better now. Let me try again:

We're twelve weeks away from June 30th, and the Bush Administration's plan for transferring sovereignty to Iraq has only two small problems: Our efforts to impose law and order are falling short, and no one on the Iraqi side is ready to pick up the ball. Bush's slap-dash approach to nation-building has always been the Achilles' heel of this project; there was never any doubt about the military outcome, but there were plenty of questions on our ability to transform post-war Iraq into a peaceful democratic state.

Iraq has a population of 24.7 million, half of whom are under the age of 19. The U.S. has about 130,000 soldiers and 26,000 Marines in Iraq, plus 26,500 troops from the coalition of the bullied willing. That makes a grand total of about 182,500 personnel, or about one soldier for every 135 Iraqi civilians.

Successful peacekeeping operations require about one soldier for every 50 civilians. In order to secure Iraq effectively, we would need 500,000 troops on the ground; in order to sustain that level of commitement over time, we'd need 2.5 million people rotating in and out. Just for Iraq.

(Sources: CIA World Factbook, GlobalSecurity.org, the RAND Corporation.)

American plans to create a new Iraqi army envisioned a troop strength of 40,000; by the end of last year we had recruited 700, of whom 300 resigned over low pay. Under Saddam, Iraq's army numbered about 300,000 to 400,000 troops. Paul Bremer disbanded that army in late May, possibly under orders from above.

Iraq's national police force should grow to 50,000 policemen by 2006; Baghdad, a city of 6 million, currently has 8,000. It takes 13,705 officers to maintain law and order in Chicago (population 2.9 million); New York City has 39,110 officers for a population of 8 million.

(Sources: U.S. Census, Chicago Police 2002 Annual Report, NYPD Frequently Asked Questions.)

Iraq's Governing Council has all the credibility of a hand-picked collection of toadying exiles, in part because it is a collection of hand-picked toadying exiles, but also because it's done nothing in the past year to dispel that perception or to win the trust and support of the Iraqi people. The presidency of the IGC rotates every month, making it impossible for a political leader to emerge on the national or international stage; in the absence of a political figurehead, religious leaders like Ali Sistani have stepped into the gap where Iraq's Hamid Karzai should be.

In short, we have less than half the number of bodies required to maintain even the illusion that the rule of law is in effect; George W. Bush's June 30th date is based solely on domestic political considerations; the Iraqi Governing Council is hopelessly unable to assume sovereignty; and our efforts to establish a government of the Iraqi people, by the Iraqi people, and for the Iraqi people, are so woefully inadequate that we are in danger of turning Iraq into the next Lebanon.

My support for the war in Iraq was based on humanitarian grounds (i.e., that Saddam was a genocidal tyrant), and on the assumption that our government would at least be minimally competent to administer post-war Iraq. The Bush Administration has succeded at removing Saddam and his sons, but failed at almost everything else: When you look at all that we could have gained by reforming the government in Iraq, we've accomplished only the bare minimum that followed directly from deposing Saddam.

Yesterday John Kerry called the situation in Iraq "one of the greatest failures of diplomacy and failures of judgement that I have seen in all the time that I've been in public life." I think he understates the case.

- Posted by Scott Forbes at 12:39 pm. comments.

Wednesday, 07 April 2004

Addicted to style. I'm not stealing money to support my CSS habit (yet), but I've created yet another style sheet for your viewing pleasure. Native Aussies may recognize the color scheme here; Oz's "team colors" for national sports are green and gold, and the national rugby team is called the Wallabies. America's national colors are of course red, white and blue, taken from our flag — but Australia's flag is also red, white and blue (mostly blue), as are the flags of England, France, New Zealand and many other nations.

So the Aussies sensibly decided to use some other colors, and settled on green and gold sometime around 1928 or so. Sports in Australia usually means rugby, cricket, Olympic swimming, or Lleyton Hewitt; there's some basketball here, but no March Madness… and sports like baseball, hockey, and what I refer to as "football" are harder to find.

Anyhow, if you don't like the new color scheme, you can always change it back by selecting your old favorite from the "Style" menu in the sidebar. (The previous default was "Gray Box".) Enjoy!

- Posted by Scott Forbes at 5:36 am. comments.

Monday, 05 April 2004

The Producers. A fellow expat provides a link to a pop quiz, which claims to measure how many Earths we'd need if everyone consumed as many resources as you do. (You greedy scoundrel.) This problem with this claim is that it relies on a blatantly misleading premise, which you'll only learn by closely reading the site's FAQ:

Footprint results are expressed in global acres (or global hectares in metric measurement). Each of those acres (hectares) corresponds to one acre (hectare) of biologically productive space with world-average productivity. [Emphasis added]

The quiz is calculating what would happen if we increased the world's average consumption level to match yours—while holding the world's average production level at its current rate, which is well below yours. The implication is that the world's "biologically productive space" is working at its peak efficiency—that there is absolutely nothing we could do anywhere in the world to increase crop yields, raise energy output, or improve the productivity of the average human being. The earth is red-lined at its maximum capacity, and we can't even squeeze out one more lousy ear of corn; our only option is to conserve, conserve, conserve, or else start preparing for the coming Malthusian collapse. No more wealth can be generated.

To put this claim in its proper perspective, I'd like to offer an alternate quiz: This one holds worldwide consumption at today's levels, and measures what would happen if we raised or lowered per capita production. In other words, the quiz will sneakily imply the problem is not that some people are consuming more than their "fair share" of resources—instead, it will insinuate that certain tree-hugging deadbeat socialists are not pulling their weight on the global production scale. Get with the program, slackers! Let's see how you do on this quiz:

1. Who produced the fruits, veggies and grains you ate today?
   Grew them myself, backyard garden, "organically" (no fertilizer)
   Local farm, horse or ox-drawn plow, animal dung
   Family farm, diesel tractor, hybrid crop, chemical fertilizer
   Agribusiness, tractor and combine, genetically modified crop
2. Where does the protein in your diet come from?
   Caught it myself, hunting or fishing with hand tools
   Soybeans / vitamin supplements (Westerners only)
   Local producer selling excess chickens, ham, beef, fish, etc.
   Bulk shipment of meat/fish/poultry, supermarket chain
3. How about the roof over your head?
   Built it myself from mud, clay, and thatched reeds
   Amish friends and I worked together and raised it
   Professionally constructed by local tradespeople
   Bought it off the subdivision plan, as did 100 of my neighbors
4. Who made your furniture?
   I don't own any furniture
   Built myself, by hand, out of old recycled junk
   Hand-built by professional craftspeople
   That Ikea warehouse really does have everything
5. On a day-to-day basis, what do you do for a living?
   Try to get enough food and water to survive the next 24 hours
   Backbreaking manual labor, 80+ hours per week
   Blue-collar labor, 40 hours per week with overtime
   White-collar labor, salaried with options and incentives
6. Tell me about your country's political structure.
   Tribal anarchy with multiple chiefs and warlords
   Dictatorship, kleptocracy, single-party rule
   Socialism, central planning, stifling bureaucracy
   Democracy, capitalism, free speech and religion
7. How's your education?
   I can't even read this quiz
   High school equivalent
   College or university degree
   Post-graduate study
8. You've just contracted a major illness. How do you treat it?
   Don't tell the government I'm sick!
   Folk medicine, herbal tea, rest and liquids
   Self-treatment with over-the-counter medication
   See a doctor, make full use of Western medicine
9. How do you, personally, heat your home?
   I live in a warm climate or wrap myself in animal hides
   I burn wood or other organic fuels
   I burn coal or other fossil fuels
   I have electricity from an external source
10. Your job isn't paying enough. What do you do?
    Steal money / take bribes
    Strike! Strike! Strike!
    Work longer hours / take a second job
    Find better job / start your own business

- Posted by Scott Forbes at 1:25 pm. comments.

Saturday, 03 April 2004

Swimming with the fishes. The reason for light blogging this month is that I'm learning how to scuba dive. I spent most of my spare time last week reading up on regulators and nitrogen narcosis and other exciting diving safety lessons, and spent most of today watching instructional videos and being tested on what I'd learned. We tried on our diving equipment for the first time today (it feels like wearing a big metal tortoise shell) and tomorrow we go into the pool for our first lessons on breathing.

(The first rule of scuba diving: Never stop breathing. If you inhale a lungful of air from your scuba tank, hold your breath, and then ascend, the air expands in volume and your lungs will rupture like leaky balloons. You don't have this problem during normal swimming, because you can never inhale more than one lungful x 1 atmosphere; with scuba gear you can inhale up to five times as many molecules, all packed together by the water pressure. It's like how the air is thinner at the top of a mountain, only in reverse.)

After we finish our lessons here in Sydney, my lady-love and I are off to Heron Island, to complete our training and dive the Great Barrier Reef. I'm hoping to equip my digital camera for underwater photography (I think there's some kind of waterproof shell you can buy), so ideally I'll bring back pictures.

- Posted by Scott Forbes at 10:19 am. comments.

Saturday, 27 March 2004

Witness protection. When National Security Advisor Condi Rice first refused to testify under oath before the 9/11 commission, I called her on it then and there: The only motive for avoiding that oath is to avoid the penalty for perjury. Even under oath, Rice could still refuse to answer questions that would jeopardize national security — and if avoiding embarrassment for the Bush Administration was her concern, she could easily take the oath in private.

Three months (and a week of Richard Clarke's devastating testimony) later, other people are starting to question whether Rice's separation-of-powers argument is a smokescreen to cover her real concerns. Separation of powers didn't stop Clinton's National Security Adivsor, Sandy Berger, from testifying before Congress in 1997; it didn't stop Reagan's National Security Advisor, John Poindexter, from testifying before Congress in 1986.

Of course, Poindexter was convicted of a felony on the basis of his testimony, since he lied about the Iran-Contra affair. Perhaps Condi Rice lies awake at night thinking about her predecessor's fate, and doesn't want to rely on a presidential pardon to protect her from doing time; or, perhaps, she dreads what Bush and Rove will do to her if she gives honest testimony. After watching (and participating) in the scorched-earth attacks on Clarke, Paul O'Neill, Joe Wilson, and other whistleblowers, breaking the code of silence on Bush's pre-9/11 lapses may be too much for Rice to handle.

So, I think it's time to offer Rice a choice: The 9/11 commission should offer Rice immunity from prosecution if she testifies under oath.

If that doesn't do it, then the gloves should come off and the commission should issue a subpoena. I don't think separation of powers can be used to thwart public accountability of senior administration officials — and when the Nixon Administration tried it the last time around, the courts didn't think so either.

- Posted by Scott Forbes at 5:25 am. comments.

Saturday, 20 March 2004

Pants on fire. Donald Rumsfeld, caught in the act.

- Posted by Scott Forbes at 11:32 am. comments.

Saturday, 20 March 2004

You'll be tested on this later. Last month my server logs recorded a spike of traffic from a California high school to my Killing Fields of Cambodia photos (viewer discretion advised); apparently a history teacher in the Valley put my vacation snapshots on the curriculum, so for a week or two a gaggle of teenagers passed through and browsed the not-at-all-pretty pictures.

This month I'm getting hits from a college in Maine, where a 200-level course on terrorism has made my photo essay a reading assignment. (I'm due by Friday.)

I realize this is an insignificant blip in the grand scheme of things, but I'll take what I can get: If I've achieved nothing else, at least college professors are assigning something I've done as homework now. (Okay, one college professor. And a high school history teacher. You've got to start somewhere, right?)

- Posted by Scott Forbes at 11:13 am. comments.

Friday, 19 March 2004

Cargo-cult democracy. The late Nobel laureate Richard Feynman warned about the dangers of cargo-cult science: Of theories that don't work, and results we ignore, because we think the theories ought to work — and because we'd rather deceive ourselves than examine beliefs or admit mistakes.

"In the South Seas there is a cargo cult of people. During the war they saw airplanes land with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen now. So they've arranged to imitate things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head like headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas—he's the controller—and they wait for the airplanes to land. They're doing everything right. The form is perfect. It looks exactly the way it looked before. But it doesn't work. No airplanes land. So I call these things cargo cult science, because they follow all the apparent precepts and forms of scientific investigation, but they're missing something essential, because the planes don't land."

At the moment, the Bush Administration is setting up Iraq with all the trappings of democracy: They've had a signing ceremony for their founding parchment, and soon they'll have an executive, a parliament, and some people in robes who look like judges. They'll even have ballot boxes and put on a fine show of an election: The New York Times will run a light-hearted story about the novelty of campaign posters in Iraq, and a TV news crew will embed itself with some local Basra candidate for a week. It'll all be very pretty and inspiring, and carefully timed to boost George W. Bush's re-election hopes.

But the rule of law has not been established.

If the American-backed Iraqi government can't secure the rights that its constitution loftily promises — if bombs and bullets continue to be the tools of choice for settling Iraqi political disputes — then all the ribbon-cutting ceremonies in the world won't make Iraq a democracy. Iraq's old constitution, the one in effect when Saddam was in charge, guaranteed freedom of speech and the right to a fair trial. Saddam's Iraq had parliaments and elections. Heck, the Soviet Union had parliaments and elections, and their consitution guaranteed freedom of religion. Haiti's constitution imposed term limits. On paper, China's had freedom of speech since long before Tiananmen Square.

The Constitution of the United States is often revered as the cornerstone of our democracy. We cherish the Bill of Rights, and we believe sincerely that our system of government should be the model for all others. But the Constitution would be empty words if not for the will of the American people to enforce it. Our Bill of Rights guarantees that "In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial"; but if we lack the courage to enforce that right, and permit the Attorney General to suspend it at will, then the Bill of Rights is a promise to ourselves that we've broken.

In Iraq we've created some of the conditions in which a democracy might thrive, first and foremost by removing Saddam Hussein. Some might argue that that step alone redeems our entire effort: That regardless of whatever else we achieve, we're leaving Iraq's government in better shape than we found it. One of the best arguments for rushing in where Bush's father feared to tread was that we've learned more about Saddam since then, and that everything we've learned tells us that removing Saddam was a moral necessity. Saddam Hussein and his monstrous sons were an affront to every ideal that we hold to be self-evident, and we'll never need to apologize for putting a stop to his murderous regime.

But Bush promised much, much more than that. Iraq was to be our showcase for creating democracy in the Mideast: It was a dangerous house in a blighted neighborhood, to be torn down and rebuilt with modern plumbing and all the latest advances. We were going to do in Iraq what we did in Germany and Japan and South Korea, where we planted the seeds of democracy and they flourished.

And, apparently, some members of the Bush Administration believed that democracy is the natural state of human existence. All we needed to do in Iraq was to remove the obstacles that prevented democracy (i.e., Saddam Hussein); once that was done, a democracy would spontaneously form. Extensive planning for the post-war was largely a waste of effort: In a matter of months the Iraqi people would be cheering for hand-picked President Ahmed Chalabi, and then throwing flowers in our wake as our tanks rumbled off into the sunset.

I'm sure that when June 30 comes around, when Bush pulls out his "mission accomplished" banner and lords it over the Iraqi government, the transition will be well stage-managed and it'll provide another excellent photo opportunity. But I fear that we've sacrificed hundreds of lives, and spent hundreds of billions of dollars, to raise the Iraqi government to the level of an Egypt: A sham democracy with paper freedoms and mock elections, that stands as our ally only because we pay them billions in foreign aid.

Ridding the world of Saddam Hussein and his WMD shell game was a worthy cause for its own sake — but that part is done now, and we need a leader who can get us the rest of the way there. We need someone who can turn Iraq from America's pet project into a civilization-wide effort — someone who understands that in Germany and Japan and South Korea we had a mandate, and support and goodwill from the rest of the free world. Today in Iraq we don't have that luxury, and we're approaching the point where it's not a luxury anymore: Our success in Iraq depends on the goodwill of the Iraqi people; and, in turn, it depends on the goodwill of people in other countries.

Cargo-cult democracy won't stabilize Iraq. Unless we want to spend the rest of our lives on Code Orange, it's time to make peace with our estranged allies, it's time to use the tools of diplomacy to restore our stature abroad, and it's time to analyze what we've done so far and to learn from our successes and mistakes. John Kerry is prepared to take those next steps in the War on Terror; George Bush either can't or won't, and that makes him the wrong man for the job.

- Posted by Scott Forbes at 12:20 pm. comments.

Monday, 15 March 2004

Our sincere condolences, you filthy appeasing bastards: Right-wing crocodile tears for Spain appear to have dried up suddenly now that the election results are in and the Bushistas are on the way out. In less than 72 hours Glenn Reynolds went from sending flowers to the Spanish Embassy to the hyperbolic "Terrorists have succeeded in toppling the Spanish government." Never mind that outgoing PM Jose Maria Aznar and his right-wing Popular Party failed to prevent the March 11 terrorist attacks, played politics with the investigation, and attempted to deliberately mislead the Spanish people: The right wing's moral for this story is that Spain Has Cried Uncle and they're now part of Old Europe again.

Looking at the world through black-and-white glasses does save the Right a lot of time and effort: They can quickly divide the world into two opposing camps labelled "With Us" and "With The Terrorists," and categorize everyone with ease. Pakistan is With Us. France is With The Terrorists. Democrats, if not actual card-carrying Al Qaeda members, are clearly With The Terrorists. And Spain, by virtue of holding a free and fair election which the right-wing party did not win, has just switched sides and joined the League of Chickens. An entire Spanish election reduces to a straight-up referendum on whether to fight terrorism or appease it, and the only possible way to decide your vote is to ask "What Would Osama Do?" and then pull the other lever.

(Meanwhile, Pakistan is supplying nuclear do-it-yourself kits to Iran and North Korea, and Saudi Arabia is pumping money into the terrorist support network — but the Right's either-or framework doesn't know how to handle those problems, so under the rug they go.)

The problem with the Right is that they like the sound of democracy, but they don't actually want to participate in one. There's too much risk that the people might make the wrong decision, and it's way too hard to win debates and build coalitions and make compromises and put a convincing case to the people. It's much easier to cut a few corners, and blame a terrorist attack on a politically convenient scapegoat — or to spice up the case for a pre-emptive war in Iraq by throwing in a few groundless 9/11 allegations.

Spain's elections may be grim foreshadowing for the Bush Administration, but they're a victory for the concept of honest, accountable government. Spanish voters might have been willing to forgive and forget that Aznar sent troops to a war they opposed — but when he tried to hide the facts about the March 11 bombings, they turned his party out of office. Bush and his supporters would do well to learn that moral, instead of blindly lamenting that Spain has departed from the path of the righteous.

- Posted by Scott Forbes at 12:51 pm. comments.

Tuesday, 09 March 2004

Lying liars. A conservative group called "Citizens United" unveiled its first set of ads attacking John Kerry today. According to their web site, Citizens United stands for "complete U.S. withdrawal from the United Nations, defeat of the treaty to establish a permanent U.N.-controlled International Criminal Court, and rejection of one-world government," among other tinfoil-hat causes. (Watch out for those black helicopters, guys.)

Among the illustrious citizens who make up this civic organization are its Chairman of the Board, Floyd Brown. For those who don't recall the name, here's a refresher:

"When we're through, people are going to think that Willie Horton is Michael Dukakis' nephew." —Floyd Brown, September 1988

Brown was the producer of the GOP's most infamous attack ad, the spot that gave violent crime an African-American face and then used it to dump slime on Dukakis. He was one of the hit men who helped put Bush I in the White House, and spent most of the Nineties — along with Citizens United's president, David Bossie — cooking up lies about a real estate investment called Whitewater. Without the (ahem) "help" of men like Brown and Bossie, the Clinton years would have been a lot less interesting, and the government would have wasted a lot less money on politically motivated witch hunts.

So, if you get a chance to see those shiny new Kerry attack ads, just remember these three words: Consider the source.

- Posted by Scott Forbes at 10:01 am. comments.

Saturday, 06 March 2004

Why words matter. In a remarkable speech, Tony Blair shows why I'd vote for him in a heartbeat if I could — and, once again, puts George Bush to shame. Blair's speech is so good that I can't do it justice with an excerpt: Read the whole thing and then come back here.

Blair puts his case for war against Saddam on very solid ground: He acknowledges that some of the intelligence reports he received before the war have turned out not to be true, in particular the claim that Iraq could have WMDs ready for launch on 45 minutes' notice. He refutes the accusation that he'd portrayed Iraq as an "imminent threat:" Her Majesty's Government responds to imminent threats with swift action, not diplomatic lobbying in the Security Council. He can cite his own words from January 2003 to support his position.

And, he anchors his case for war on the premise that Britain was enforcing United Nations resolutions, that the treaty of Westphalia is not the last word in the creation of international law, and that the most effective counter to the spread of WMDs is to spread justice, freedom, democracy, and the rule of law even further.

Blair even acknowledges that there is a rational, arguable case against the war, on the grounds that Saddam's threat truly was not imminent — that he had been contained in his box for twelve years (albeit at great cost to the Iraqi people), and that the smokescreen of defiance around his WMD program was exactly that: A smokescreen to keep his enemies guessing, and hold both internal and external foes at bay. In the post-9/11 world, Blair was unwilling to risk the security of his nation on a question of whether Saddam could be trusted. Others may have weighed the risks of war, and chosen differently; Blair respects that point of view, but he does not share it.

Meanwhile, Bush's case for war continues to rest on false premises, and makes little effort to separate fact from fiction. Compare Bush's State of the Union Address:

After the chaos and carnage of September the 11th, it is not enough to serve our enemies with legal papers. The terrorists and their supporters declared war on the United States, and war is what they got. (Applause.)

Some in this chamber, and in our country, did not support the liberation of Iraq. Objections to war often come from principled motives. But let us be candid about the consequences of leaving Saddam Hussein in power. We're seeking all the facts.

…to Blair's speech:

The threat we face is not conventional. It is a challenge of a different nature from anything the world has faced before. It is to the world's security, what globalisation is to the world's economy.

It was defined not by Iraq but by September 11th. September 11th did not create the threat Saddam posed.

But it altered crucially the balance of risk as to whether to deal with it or simply carry on, however imperfectly, trying to contain it.

Let me attempt an explanation of how my own thinking, as a political leader, has evolved during these past few years.

Blair's statement is clear: September 11th didn't create Saddam, but it changed the way we perceived him. Bush's statement is fuzzy: Osama bin Laden wanted a war, so we gave one to Saddam Hussein.

If you're sympathetic to Bush, you can try to fit Blair's speech between the lines of Bush's sketchy comments… but the leader of the free world shouldn't need an interpreter. Blair builds his case on the rock that September 11th changed our worldview; Bush builds on the quicksand premise that Saddam was behind 9/11.

Compare Bush's interview with Diane Sawyer:

DIANE SAWYER: Again, I'm just trying to ask, these are supporters, people who believed in the war who have asked the question.

PRESIDENT BUSH: Well, you can keep asking the question and my answer's gonna be the same. Saddam was a danger and the world is better off cause we got rid of him.

DIANE SAWYER: But stated as a hard fact, that there were weapons of mass destruction as opposed to the possibility that he could move to acquire those weapons still -

PRESIDENT BUSH: So what's the difference?

DIANE SAWYER: Well -

PRESIDENT BUSH: The possibility that he could acquire weapons. If he were to acquire weapons, he would be the danger. That's, that's what I'm trying to explain to you. A gathering threat, after 9/11, is a threat that needed to be de - dealt with, and it was done after 12 long years of the world saying the man's a danger. And so we got rid of him and there's no doubt the world is a safer, freer place as a result of Saddam being gone.

DIANE SAWYER: But, but, again, some, some of the critics have said this combined with the failure to establish proof of, of elaborate terrorism contacts, has indicated that there's just not precision, at best, and misleading, at worst.

PRESIDENT BUSH: Yeah. Look - what - what we based our evidence on was a very sound National Intelligence Estimate. ...

DIANE SAWYER: Nothing should have been more precise?

PRESIDENT BUSH: What - I, I - I made my decision based upon enough intelligence to tell me that this country was threatened with Saddam Hussein in power.

…with Blair on the same subject:

Of course the opponents are boosted by the fact that though we know Saddam had WMD; we haven't found the physical evidence of them in the 11 months since the war. But in fact, everyone thought he had them. That was the basis of UN Resolution 1441.

It's just worth pointing out that the search is being conducted in a country twice the land mass of the UK, which David Kay's interim report in October 2003 noted, contains 130 ammunition storage areas, some covering an area of 50 square miles, including some 600,000 tons of artillery shells, rockets and other ordnance, of which only a small proportion have as yet been searched in the difficult security environment that exists.

But the key point is that it is the threat that is the issue.

Blair concedes, as he must, that we have not found evidence that Saddam actually had WMDs at the time of the invasion — and then proceeds to make the point that not knowing whether Saddam had WMDs or not was an unacceptable risk.

Bush's argument is that, if the Administration said Saddam had WMDs and he didn't, so what? Saddam is gone and the world's better off. The ends justify the means.

Bush's case for war reduces to the premise that Bush is a good guy and you should trust him to do what's right, without actually worrying yourself about little details — such as the idea that America's government should be accountable to the people.

This is why Blair will be re-elected, and Bush will not. Tony Blair offers a case for war that even the most ardent pacifist must consider: He makes his case on sound principles that conservatives and liberals identify with. George W. Bush's case for war is centered on George W. Bush, which isn't compelling to those who distrust him — and there's no guarantee that Bush's gut is an infinite source of wisdom.

Custer had good instincts too, up to a certain point.

- Posted by Scott Forbes at 6:50 am. comments.

Thursday, 04 March 2004

America the Bad Cop? A comment from one of Instapundit's readers confirms the view from abroad: In four short years, America's image has gone from "the world's policeman" to Dirty Harry.

Further, whether they intended it or not, I think Colin Powell and Donald Rumsfeld make an effective good cop/bad cop pairing. Same for Tony Blair and George Bush. I love'em all, and I feel blessed that these people were in these positions at this time.

American society has always had a deep and abiding respect for the individual. Our heroes stand out from the crowd, and stand up for what's right even if it means standing alone; sometimes we even have a grudging admiration for someone who "takes the law into his own hands," and applies his own moral code to a situation where our legal systems have failed to provide justice. We may condemn the vigilante for stepping outside the law, but if the result pleases us then we've been known to let it slide.

At the same time, we realize (at least in the abstract) that power corrupts. The authority figure who steps over the line, the man with the badge who abuses his powers, is not a hero in our culture: He's a villain. In our escapist fantasies, where justice comes from the barrel of a gun, the star of the show is always the little guy: Rambo wasn't a general, Dirty Harry wasn't the chief of police — and if they were, we'd have been horrified by their actions.

So the idea that the President of the United States is playing the bad cop on the world stage is not something I'd take as a blessing, even if I had supported the war in Iraq. The idea that the President saw fit to exaggerate the threat Saddam Hussein posed, and misinform the people in order to achieve his ends, is deeply disturbing: Instead of doing the hard yards to make his case for a pre-emptive war, Bush sold the general public a bill of goods that included mushroom clouds, nerve gas, Al Qaeda ties, and a wealth of other claims that all turned out (ahem) not to be true.

That doesn't make Bush a hero in my book. I think America was better served by playing the good cop, like Clinton and Bush Sr. and Reagan did; we haven't had a President who played "bad cop" since Nixon, when he tried to convince North Vietnam that he was a madman. Clinton managed to fight a war in Europe without doing this much damage to our alliances and our image; Bush Sr. worked within the international system to expel Saddam from Kuwait (and recognized the limits of what he could achieve); Reagan charmed the Europeans into accepting short-range nuclear missiles on their soil.

All these achievements required that America play the good cop, and all these achievements are beyond the capabilities of George W. Bush — who rejects the very idea that international law can be made to serve American interests. By running roughshod over would-be allies, Bush has weakened America's global leadership: Even among nations that joined our "coalition of the willing," America's credibility and goodwill have been eroded. We may appreciate that Tony Blair has done a better job than our own leaders (!) of stating our case for war, but we all know Great Britain is not our military equal: If Britain's the good cop and America's the bad cop, then Dirty Harry is running the station.

I think America would be better off if we were perceived as the good cop, and just because Bush couldn't walk and chew gum doesn't mean it can't be done: A capable leader should be able to fight the terrorist threat and maintain America's image as one of the good guys. We shouldn't be forced to choose one or the other just because Bush lacked the skills to do both.

- Posted by Scott Forbes at 8:47 am. comments.

Tuesday, 24 February 2004

My mother the terrorist. Yesterday a Bush Administration official designated my parents as members of a terrorist organization. To think that Mom and Dad had me fooled all those years: Here I thought they were teaching kids how to read and do math, when in fact they were subversively manipulating those innocent children to question authority, form their own opinions, and possibly even to vote for Democrats. Treason! Treason, I say!

Education Secretary Rod Paige later clarified his remarks, saying that it was the members of the National Education Assocation's union organization who were terrorists, not the rank and file members of the union. Unfortunately Dad was our local school district's chief negotiator before he retired, which means he probably still qualifies: No doubt such nefarious activities as leading a contract negotiation or striking for better pay (gasp!) qualify as terrorist program-related activities.

So, it looks like Mom and Dad are getting a one-way ticket to Gitmo, without the benefit of trial or counsel — just like the other U.S. citizens who have been so designated by the Bush Administration. It'll be rough at Christmas time, but I'm sure we'll rest easier knowing that War President Bush is keeping our nation safe and secure.

(Link via Whiskey Bar.)

- Posted by Scott Forbes at 7:20 am. comments.

Tuesday, 24 February 2004

I went to a caucus, and it was okay. It was the Howard Dean campaign in miniature: Last Friday I attended the Democrats Abroad caucus in Sydney, Australia, spoke on behalf of Dean, helped him win a plurality of votes on the first ballot, and then everyone else in the room united behind Kerry. I now have a very good understanding of how Dean lost the Iowa caucus, and of what to do differently next time — but that enlightenment didn't come in time to help win Dean a delegate (or, in this case, a lousy one-fourth of a delegate).

In spite of Australia having the sixth-largest population of Americans living abroad, Americans living in Australia are surprisingly hard to round up for a political meeting. This is partly because many Americans came to Australia in the first place to avoid American politics (Canada wasn't the only place where Vietnam draft-dodgers dodged, y'know), and partly because people speak English in Australia — sort of — and are generally friendly to us foreigners. In other countries you find the Americans clumped together in a walled compound and leaning on each other for mutual support, so it's relatively easy to contact them all and find the ones who are motivated enough to attend a caucus. That's not the case here.

So, Democrats Abroad is pretty thin on the ground in Oz. Nineteen people showed up for the caucus in Sydney; ideally there would have been regional caucuses in Melbourne, Brisbane and so forth that fed their results into the Sydney caucus, but DAA didn't have the resources to organize more than one meeting. Some of the attendees were familiar faces: Dean supporters from the January and February meetups turned out to support their candidate, in spite of the fact that Dean had stopped campaigning the week before. Others were newcomers, at least to me.

The night began with statements from the candidates, who could have either sent a statement or a spokesperson (or both). Wesley Clark had mailed in a statement before he dropped out, and John Kerry had sent his statement as well, so two volunteers read them out on behalf of those candidates. I was introduced as the head of the Dean campaign in Australia (it's amazing what $29.95 will buy you on meetup.com) and made a few remarks on why people should still vote for Dean even though he's not actively campaigning. (Among other points, I noted that Australia wouldn't even be having a caucus if it weren't for the Dean supporters who had volunteered to help, which was true.) Edwards and Kucinich didn't supply a statement, but supporters of theirs got up and said a few words on their behalf.

After that, we held a straw poll — which Dean won:

Candidate	Votes
Dean	6
Edwards	5
Kerry	5
Kucinich	2
Clark	1

The poll results were non-binding, but provided a "sense of the room" before we began the actual caucus. Since there were 19 people present, one candidate had to emerge with ten votes in order to win a majority; after nominating our delegates (who each pledged to support a particular candidate at the convention), the first ballot went as follows:

Candidate	Votes
Dean	7
Kerry	6
Edwards	3
Kucinich	3

So far, so good. The rules of the caucus called for the candidate with the lowest vote total to be dropped — and in the event of a tie both candidates were dropped, so Edwards and Kucinich went bye-bye.

And then came my moment of zen enlightenment. Because there was only one-fourth of a delegate at stake in this caucus, the rules stipulated there would be no horse-trading or discussions of any kind between rounds: Technically speaking there was nothing to trade, because the fourth of a delegate could not be sub-divided any further. So, we immediately proceeded to a second round of voting, without any additional caucusing:

Candidate	Votes
Kerry	11
Dean	7

One person abstained in the second tally, but it didn't matter: Kerry had at least ten, and that was all he needed.

If we'd been able to talk amongst ourselves in between rounds — if I'd had thirty seconds and the ear of the Edwards supporters — I might have been able to talk them into swinging their votes over to Dean. At this stage of the campaign, losing to Dean would have counted as a draw in the race between Kerry and Edwards; once Edwards was no longer in a position to win the caucus, his supporters should have recognized as much, and thrown their support to Dean (just as Edwards and Kucinich supporters joined forces in Iowa to deny Dean any second-round victories there).

And, if I had realized going into the caucus that there would be no horse-trading between rounds of voting, I'd have pointed the situation out to Edwards and Kerry supporters earlier in the meeting, while I was speaking on Dean's behalf. (This is what I get for assuming that a caucus is a caucus, and not reading the actual rules more closely.) A timely reminder to Edwards fans that they should have done the strategic thing, and played for a draw in round two, could have resulted in a win for Dean and helped Edwards's chances by denying Kerry a win.

But that didn't happen, and I suspect that a story like this one played out in several hundred little Iowa hamlets on the evening of their caucuses too. Dean's supporters were high in number but low in experience, and the more seasoned players knew how to work the system to their advantage. (Of course a lot of the blame for Dean's failure to ignite must fall squarely on Dean's shoulders: We all know the media hates a front-runner, and that Dean's populist message was an explicit threat to entrenched power bases everywhere — but we all know that. You can't run a campaign and expect to win without taking those factors into account, and Dean's campaign miscalculated them.)

The end result? I'm now slightly better equipped to participate in a caucus, if that need ever arises again, and I'm in touch with several like-minded people who'd prefer that our next president be a bit more fiscally responsible, slightly more respectful of our allies, free from crippling biases and untested ideologies, less of a wingnut when appointing judges, and so on. If Howard Dean has accomplished nothing else (and I think history will record that Dean accomplished more than we currently give him credit for), then at least he's gotten me off the sidelines.

- Posted by Scott Forbes at 3:44 am. comments.

Tuesday, 24 February 2004

...our lives, our $35, and our sacred honor. A year ago I paid my dues to defend the Bill of Rights: I joined the American Civil Liberties Union (First Amendment), the National Riflemen's Association (Second Amendment), and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (Fourth Amendment). (My Third Amendment rights appear to be safe for the moment, and I'm still shopping around for a fierce Sixth Amendment defender: I should probably just pay the ACLU twice, or else start paying more attention to this court case.) Now that a year has passed, it's time to ask the question: Which of these memberships should I renew?

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On the surface, the NRA is the slickest outfit of the three: They sent me a real plastic membership card with an American flag and eagle motif, which can be presented at Ramada Inns nationwide for up to a 30% discount. (No joke. Membership also includes a discount drug plan, plus bargains on all sorts of NRA apparel and merchandise.) The NRA was also the most active of the three organizations at bombarding me with e-mail, requesting that I fax my legislators and urge them to confirm Bill Pryor's nomination to the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals; they also appear to have shared e-mailing lists with Reverend Donald Wildmon and the American Family Association, a tinfoil hat group on the far right that's now sending me an apocalyptic e-mail of doom once weekly. (At least, I can't fathom any other way I would have gotten onto the AFA mailing list, unless Rev. Wildmon is indiscriminately spamming.)

I have to say that, while I believe that legal, responsible gun ownership is a right that should be protected, I don't approve of treating the judiciary as a second-chance legislature: Judges should be referees and not players. So, I won't be sending any more membership dues in the NRA's direction — but if there's some other organization that defends the Second Amendment without showing a broad, sweeping contempt for the rule of law in the process, I'm all ears.

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The ACLU was more of a shoe-string outfit, providing a tear-away paper membership card with a Statue of Liberty theme. (I was disappointed. How am I supposed to show off that I'm a "card-carrying member of the ACLU" with a card that looks like I tore it from a magazine?) There aren't any benefits associated with ACLU membership, aside from the inner glow that comes from supporting a good cause: No discounts, no health plan, no package deals on megaphones or newsprint that I can see. The ACLU sent me occasional e-mails (at least once a month) of the "newsletter" variety, or inviting me to join an online chat with someone (usually a lawyer) about the ongoing threat to civil liberties.

Meanwhile, the ACLU used my membership dues to defend— Rush Limbaugh's right to privacy. Somewhere in a higher dimension Voltaire is laughing with delight: I may think Rush is a big fat liar, but I'll still pay to defend his rights. The ACLU is also fighting the idea that John Ashcroft can violate the plain words of the Sixth Amendment at will, if the defendant is accused of (ahem) weapons of mass destruction program related activities. I'm all for getting terrorists off the streets, but not by enabling future tyrants in the Justice Department. Keep up the good work, ACLU — here's another $35, and it's money well spent.

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The EFF surprised me by being the least well-equipped of the three organizations to accept my membership dues via their web site: You would have thought the opposite, but I guess the other two get more donations. (Although, looking at their site today, it looks like they've improved; maybe they used my $25 to upgrade their servers.) To the best of my knowledge I didn't receive any e-mails from the EFF, except for one from the webmaster acknowledging the difficulty I'd had sending them a donation. It's possible that I slipped through the cracks here, and the EFF accepted my money without actually adding me to their membership roster; or, maybe, I just absent-mindedly unchecked all the boxes that allowed the EFF to contact me, since they're very good about asking permission to e-mail.

On the other hand, the EFF goes to bat for issues that will be on the ACLU's plate in another ten years — censorship through the deliberate abuse of copyright law, "digital rights management" that restricts fair use of the material, standards bodies and industry groups that behave as de facto cartels, using the legal system as a weapon to bankrupt individuals, and so on. They're up against a gallery of 21st-century robber barons, most of whom (unlike their 19th century counterparts) don't even offer up the fig leaf that their grasping greed makes our economy more efficient. Here again I think I'm getting off cheap by spending only $25 to defend these rights, when my forefathers risked their entire fortunes and more to establish them.

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So, two out of three organizations get their renewal checks… and I'm in the market for a Second Amendment defender that isn't explicitly trying to rig the judiciary in their favor. Any takers?

- Posted by Scott Forbes at 12:25 am. comments.

Monday, 16 February 2004

Sea change. I've been tweaking the blog's style sheets yet again, and I've come up with a new look — but you may need a broadband connection (and an up-to-date browser) to enjoy it. The style sheet is called "Sea Salt," and you can select it from the popup menu in the sidebar; it has a background image that weighs in at about 800K, and makes use of the CSS background-attachment property, on which Micosoft's Internet Explorer browser doesn't conform to the spec.

I'm not going to suggest that you upgrade your browser to something more modern, because I don't like sites that require a certain browser or operating system any more than you do. But if you have a fast connection and a standards-compliant browser, check out the new style and let me know what you think.

Also, in the astoundingly unlikely event that someone wants to place an ad here, I've sold out to commercialism and put up a link to Blogads. Corporate sponsorship, here I come!

- Posted by Scott Forbes at 10:28 am. comments.

Monday, 16 February 2004

Riots in Redfern. And you thought race riots only happened in America: The Sydney suburb of Redfern, which I drive through on the way to work every morning, erupted in violence last night in response to the death of a local teenager. Residents of the predominantly Aboriginal area claim the teen was being chased by police (which the police deny) when he lost control of his bicycle and was impaled through the neck on a metal fence. Eight officers were injured in the ensuing riot, and the railway station was firebombed.

To make an extremely sweeping generalization, Australian Aboriginals appear to have the same social status in Oz that African-Americans endure in the United States — the bottom rung of the caste system, with many of the same stereotypes applying to both groups. The parallel isn't exact, of course, and in some ways indigenous Australians have more in common with Native Americans… but some of the problems are the same: Ghettos, poverty, crime, hostility, prejudice, lack of opportunity. I wish I could say that Australia had solved these problems and that America could learn from their example, but yesterday's violence says that isn't the case.

I drove past the railway station on the way into work today; the windows are all burned out, the sign is partially torn down, and there were more police in riot gear than I've ever personally seen. I wonder what tonight will be like.

- Posted by Scott Forbes at 9:28 am. comments.

Wednesday, 11 February 2004

First to go: Yesterday Donald Rumsfeld told reporters that he can't remember the claim that Iraq had WMDs ready to launch in 45 minutes.

I guess the second thing to go is your credibility.

- Posted by Scott Forbes at 10:18 am. comments.

Monday, 09 February 2004

Artificial sweetener. Today the United States and Australia finalized the free-trade agreement that both countries had been negotiating for almost a year; all Americans will immediately benefit from access to inexpensive Australian auto parts, light commercial vehicles, and pharmaceuticals — and eventually (give or take 18 years) will be able to purchase Australian beef and dairy products at the market price.

What Americans won't get, alas, is cheap sugar. The sugar lobby's death grip on Washington costs Americans over $2 billion a year, in artificially high prices on everything from candy to bakery goods — and, get this, American taxpayers are footing the bill for storing excess sugar in warehouses: If the price of sugar falls below the cartel's limit, the federal government buys sugar it doesn't need to drive the price back up! It's a hidden tax of about $20 a year on each American family that the Bush administration just negotiated to continue, when it had a perfect opportunity to plead for the common good instead and to show that the United States honors its allies with more than just words. Doesn't America's most reliable and steadfast ally deserve better treatment than this?

The sugar cartel employs about 55,000 people in the United States; the candy-making industry employs about 65,000, but those jobs are all escaping to Canada and Mexico to avoid the cost of American sugar. (Labor costs also play a role, but the cost of raw materials plays a bigger one.) The sugar lobby is also supported by agribusiness, because raising the price of cane and beet sugar makes corn syrup viable as a cheaper alternative. (Soft drink manufacturers made the switch from sugar to high fructose corn syrup long ago. Baked goods and candy can't change their recipes as easily, so they're stuck with paying inflated sugar prices.)

The free-trade pact is good economic news, and will benefit both Australians and Americans. But if it weren't for the sugar money spent lavishly on our representatives, the American taxpayer would have saved billions more and the Australian sugar farmer would have gained a new market. Australia's reward for going into harm's way in Afghanistan and Iraq (among other places) apparently isn't worth what the American sugar lobby spends on corrupting our public officials.

- Posted by Scott Forbes at 6:48 am. comments.

Thursday, 05 February 2004

121 down, 2,040 to go: My response to a comment over at Daily Kos (that blog is like heroin for political junkies) about the current state of the Dean campaign:

Dean Supporters…
tell me how Dean can win. I'm not saying candidates who don't have a realistic chance of winning the nomination should be forced to leave, but what could the Dean campaign possibly be planning now that the MI/WA rebound looks less feasible and states like CA seem to be heading Kerry's way…

Dean can win by getting 2,161 delegates to vote for him at the convention, just like anyone else. Keep in mind that Kerry's "unstoppable momentum" is the same momentum that Dean had a month ago, and that most (if not all) of Kerry's upswing is the bandwagoning that automatically follows the front-runner. That status could be lost just as quickly as it came, and Kerry's campaign could return to the dead-fish impersonation it was doing until mid-January.

If Dean succeeds in firewalling Kerry in Wisconsin on the 17th, or builds up a lead in the March 2nd polls, then that front-runner momentum shifts back in his direction and leaves him with enough time to collect 2,161 delegates — or, in the political junkie's dream scenario, Dean and Kerry both go to the convention with 2,000 delegates and a sudden appreciation for what a wonderful VP Edwards would make. Could be exciting.

The question is whether Dean can get his momentum back in time. For people (like me) who've thought all along that Dean was the better candidate, he's still the better candidate — and, until the nomination is decided, you should be supporting the person you think is the best candidate regardless. Choosing a candidate based on "electability" means that you're letting other people make the choice for you: It's no longer your opinion, but what you think your neighbor will think. Our friends in the GOP will gladly take advantage of that behavior and lead us around by the nose if we're not careful.

So. If Kerry gets the same press treatment that Dean did as the front-runner, then Kerry should be radioactive and covered with toxic sludge by the 17th; Dean, meanwhile, will be saving up for a media blitz in Wisconsin and setting the stage for his comeback. With Clark a week away from bowing out, and Edwards failing to broaden his regional appeal, the story that's left for the media to tell is Kerry vs. a resurgent Dean — and every journalist out there knows how to write that one up. It was always going to come down to Dean and one other candidate; everyone still has that script in their back pocket, and it won't take much to kick off an avalanche of suddenly Dean-friendly media coverage.

Dean's other, enormous advantage is that his political oxygen is coming from a broad base of small donors. The rumors of Dean's bankruptcy were greatly exaggerated, and Dean's fundraising is much healthier than conventional wisdom says it should be at this point: He is going to be very, very tough to knock out of the race by any means other than delegate math.

I'm not saying I wouldn't prefer that Dean were in the lead right now, because then I could be telling people how Dean's momentum was unstoppable and everyone else might as well throw their support behind the winning team. But if you look at where the race is likely to be in a week or two then… well, I might still get to say that line.

- Posted by Scott Forbes at 10:48 am. comments.

Tuesday, 03 February 2004

The song remains the same. From a comment left at Daily Kos:

1992.

Ross Perot rides a grassroots swell of support against special interests and politics as usual. The media unfairly characterizes him as a short, temperamental man who is unelectable. His campaign is destroyed.

2000.

John McCain rides a grassroots swell of support against special interests and politics as usual. The media unfairly characterizes him as a short, temperamental man who is unelectable. His campaign is destroyed.

2004.

Howard Dean rides a grassroots swell of support against special interests and politics as usual. The media unfairly characterizes him as a short, temperamental man who is unelectable. …and on and on and on…

- Posted by Scott Forbes at 11:22 pm. comments.

Monday, 02 February 2004

Essential reading. As a response of sorts to Steven Den Beste's Essential Library, which is a series of recent op-ed pieces reflecting his political views, I've assembled a collection that should (in my opinion) score somewhat higher on anyone's "essential" reading list.

On Justice:

Martin Luther King, Jr., "Letter from Birmingham Jail," 16 April 1963. Arrested for leading a protest march without a permit, King and his followers were condemned by local clergymen for a protest that was, in their view, "unwise and untimely." King's response, composed in his cell on scraps of paper, is a classic reminder of why we celebrate his birth.

On Defiance:

Winston Churchill, Address to the House of Commons, 4 June 1940. Holland and Belgium knocked out of the war. France teetering on the brink of surrender. The British forced to evacuate at Dunkirk, leaving 68,000 men behind. With the Soviets and Americans yet to enter the conflict, the future of Great Britain had never looked so grim; Churchill's speech, under the circumstances, is the greatest roar of defiance imaginable.

On Resolve:

Abraham Lincoln, Letter to Horace Greeley, 22 August 1862; Gettysburg Address, 19 November 1863; Second Inaugural Address, 4 March 1865. Lincoln's wartime speeches and writings are masterworks of eloquence and brevity; with a handful of words he dedicates himself—and the nation—to preserving the Union and the very concept of democracy.

On Freedom:

Ronald Reagan, "Remarks at the Brandenburg Gate," 12 June 1987; John F. Kennedy, "Remarks in the Rudolph Wilde Platz," 26 June 1963. Reagan and Kennedy are the modern-day patron saints of their respective political parties, and their speeches marked the rise and fall of the Berlin Wall. Against the backdrop of Communism's stark admission of failure, both men spoke in passionate defense of freedom.

On Liberty:

Thomas Jefferson et al., the Declaration of Independence, 4 July 1776. History records the story of America in her eternal struggle to honor these words.

- Posted by Scott Forbes at 2:55 am. comments.

Thursday, 29 January 2004

Brother Souljah. I've written before about how President Bush has missed opportunities that a better politician would have recognized—so, in the spirit of fair play, here's one that Howard Dean missed: He should have smacked down Al Sharpton in the pre-Iowa debate. Sharpton had attacked Dean for not having a person of color in his cabinet during his term of office as Vermont governor, conveniently ignoring details like Vermont's population (97% white) and the size of Dean's cabinet (five). But a politician can't hide behind facts and figures on a personal issue like this one, because the resulting response sounds too much like the classic racist's lament: I'd like to hire more people of color, really I would, but I just couldn't find any qualified candidates. Oh darn.

Dean is usually fast on his feet, but for this challenge he didn't come up with a good response: He simply replied with a soft "no," which avoided the trap of making excuses but failed to deflect the attack. The slam-dunk response was: "No, but if that's how you measure a person's commitment to diversity, then George W. Bush is your candidate. Bush has more African-Americans in his cabinet than I ever had in Vermont—but my support for diversity is more than skin deep," etc., and then segue into a list of diversity-related Dean achievements. It would have been a two-fer attack on Shartpon and Bush that ended on a Dean high note, reminded pundits of Clinton's "Sister Souljah" moment in '92, and gave Dean leverage to expand his appeal to the center—which is exactly what he needed (and still needs) to do.

Instead, Dean now faces the more difficult task, especially in this shortened primary season, of broadening his support base while laboring in Kerry's shadow. If he'd played to the center while the spotlight was still on him, it would have paid more dividends: Maybe not enough to counter the five-on-one mugging that Dean received in Iowa, but perhaps enough to make a difference in New Hampshire and the February states. It's way too early to roll out Dean's political obituary (which, if it ever gets written, will not suffer from a lack of co-authors), but his road to the nomination is now steeper than it could have been.

- Posted by Scott Forbes at 9:48 am. comments.

Thursday, 22 January 2004

Jekyll and Hyde. The question now for Howard Dean and John Kerry is: Who'll be more successful at fixing his image problem in the next five days? If New Hampshire nominates John Kerry, do they get the savvy veteran candidate we saw in Iowa last week, or the dead man campaigning we saw the month before? If they vote for Howard Dean, do they get the centrist governor with the record of fiscal responsibility, or the scary angry man who frightens moderates away?

In some ways Dean has the bigger problem: The GOP spin machine has been ruthlessly attacking him since the day he jumped out in front—and his fellow Democrats, in their usual circular-firing-squad formation, have done their level best to hamstring their own front-runner. If Kerry had emerged as the lead candidate months ago, millions of dollars would have been spent by now to convince you that Kerry is a tempermental, unelectable, elitist, flip-flopping coward who's against war when he's in uniform and supports a war when he's not. If Kerry emerges as the nominee, millions of dollars will be spent on exactly that kind of mudslinging; the question is whether Kerry will rise to the challenge, as he did in Iowa… or flop around like a dying fish, like he did from July to December.

But Kerry wasn't the front-runner, and so Dean has all the baggage. Seven days a week, for three solid months, the drum has been beating: Dean is angry, the GOP whispered. Red-faced, murmured Fox News. Unfit for office, said the cynical reporters. Mentally unstable, thundered the right-wing columnist. A raving lunatic, screamed the call-in radio show! A dangerous threat to the very foundation of our society! My God, it's Howard Dean! He's come for the children!! RUN!!! RUUNNNNN!!!! AAAAGGGH!!!!! …and so it goes.

The good news for Dean is that it's fairly easy to poke a hole in the "Dean is angry" premise: All you have to do is relax, laugh, and enjoy yourself. Four years ago the GOP whisper campaign was "Gore's a liar," are Gore never found an effective counter—in spite of the fact that Gore had been a squeaky-clean Boy Scout throughout his political career. If Dean were as angry as the smear campaign says, there'd be a parade of Vermont politicians on the talk-show circuit telling us about the day Dean ransacked the Governor's mansion or had to be restrained from striking a fellow politician. But there isn't, because he wasn't. Dean's not really an angry guy… but he only has five days to demonstrate that, before the people of New Hampshire make their choice.

- Posted by Scott Forbes at 8:04 am. comments.

Tuesday, 20 January 2004

For the benefit of my Australian readers who are wondering what's happening with American politics right now (or, more to the point, are wondering what the heck I'm talking about these days), here's a brief summary of the American political scene.

First, the basics. America has two major political parties, and a Presidential election every four years. The Republicans are America's right-wing party, and their candidate is George W. Bush; his domestic policies have centered on cutting taxes (and, some would argue, on spending money like a drunken sailor), and I'll assume you're already familiar with his foreign policies.

The Democrats are the left-wing party, formerly led by Bill Clinton, and they're now in the process of deciding who will run against Bush in 2004. (America also has a Green Party, which got about 2% of the vote in 2000—which, if Al Gore had received those votes instead, would have given him a narrow victory over George W. Bush.)

There are eight candidates running for the Democratic nomination, which is decided by a series of caucuses and primaries in the 50 U.S. states. The first caucus is always in Iowa (it's a tradition), and the first primary in New Hampshire, so these states become very important for building early momentum and winning the later contests.

The eight candidates are from a variety of backgrounds, and each has his own set of strengths and weaknesses. (The lone female candidate, former U.S. Senator and New Zealand Ambassador Carol Moseley-Braun, dropped out of the race last week.) Keeping in mind that I've already declared for Dean, here is a brief and mostly unbiased rundown of each candidate:

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Howard Dean

Dean served for ten years as the Governor of Vermont, a small state (bordering New Hampshire) in the upper northeast corner of the United States. He was a doctor before he entered politics, and in Vermont he balanced the budget and addressed health care needs. Dean opposed the Iraq war on the grounds that the Bush Administration misled the American people (and the world) in making its case for war, and that the administration failed to plan adequately for Iraq's post-war reconstruction.

Strengths: Dean has created the most innovative political campaign in recent memory, a self-organizing juggernaut that uses the Internet to rally supporters from across the 50 states (and around the world). He has raised a volunteer army and collected an unprecedented $40 million in funding, relying on millions of small donations instead of the usual big checks from the wealthy, and his candor and "Washington outsider" status resonate with voters who are tired of politics-as-usual. Dean's appeal is strongest among young voters, the upper middle class, and those who opposed the Iraq war.

Weaknesses: With his anti-war position and his "I want my country back" slogan, Dean's opponents have portrayed him as being "too angry" for the mainstream, and suggested that Dean will be "unelectable" against Bush. Dean's off-the-cuff remarks have landed him in hot water on occasion; his comment immediately after Saddam Hussein's capture—that America was no safer as a result—left him open to a series of harsh political attacks. Dean has little foreign policy experience, and is perceived as unlikely to win votes in the American South. To date he has refused to unseal the records from his term of office as Vermont governor, which weakens his claim to improve over Bush in matters of openness and accountability.

Analysis: Dean needs a win in either Iowa or New Hampshire to prove he can expand his support beyond his base; if he wins either race, he is likely to be the nominee. Dean is probably the only candidate who can raise enough money to approach Bush's $170 million war chest; with a running mate who appeals to the South and brushes up his foreign policy credentials, Dean has a good chance to unseat Bush in November.

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Wesley Clark

Clark was the Supreme Allied Commander of NATO during the war in Kosovo. A four-star general, he played a vital role in the Dayton peace accords and recently testified against Slobodan Milosevic before the International Criminal Court. Clark's position on the Iraq war was that Bush failed to enlist the support of NATO and the United Nations, both of whom are necessary to ensure our post-conflict success. Clark is from Arkansas, a Southern state that was also the home of President Bill Clinton.

Strengths: Clark can go toe-to-toe with Bush as a strong military leader who can protect America from terrorists, and has the Balkans example to illustrate that he can also win the peace. Clark has assembled his own grassroots campaign on the Internet, which—although not as impressive as Dean's—has helped him gather momentum and donations. For Democrats who worry that voters prefer Republicans when it comes to matters of national security, Clark is the antidote that puts the party back in contention.

Weaknesses: Clark has never held public office at any level, and his campaign got off to a slow, late start: He conceded the Iowa race before it began, and focused instead on New Hampshire. He's perceived as a candidate who "looks good on paper," but who may not be the real deal; opponents have accused him of being a Republican in sheep's clothing, and his appeal to women voters has been highlighted as a problem. Clark's position on the war was initially unclear and he has since been accused of flip-flopping, although his supporters will vigorously defend him against this charge.

Analysis: After Dean, Clark is the most likely candidate to win the nomination—primarily on the strength of his military background and the tacit support from Bill and Hillary. He appeals to swing voters who preferred Clinton's domestic policies, but mistrust the Democrats' foreign policy instincts; if enough people fall into that category, and enough people trust Clark to be a genuine Democrat, then he could defeat Bush in the election.

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John Kerry

A Vietnam veteran, Kerry rose to prominence when he testified before Congress in 1971, urging future Senate colleagues to end the war and bring his fellow soldiers home. Kerry has represented Massachusetts (which shares a border with New Hampshire) in the U.S. Senate since 1984, and as a Senator he supported deficit reduction, campaign finance reform, and public education improvements. Kerry voted in favor of the Iraq war, but has since expressed his displeasure with Bush's handling of the effort.

Strengths: A last-minute surge in Iowa has propelled Kerry back into the limelight; at one point he was considered the likely front-runner. Kerry has a military background and political experience, which means he can challenge Bush's wartime credentials and appeal to dyed-in-the-wool Democrats.

Weaknesses: Until last week, Kerry's campaign was considered dead on arrival. His on-again, off-again support for the Iraq war has cost him dearly on both sides of that fence, and his polling numbers in Iowa and New Hampshire had been in free-fall. Kerry was forced to dip into his own personal fortune to keep his campaign alive; he faces questions about whether he has the funding and support to go the distance. Kerry's wife, Theresa Heinz Kerry (heir to the Heinz ketchup fortune), is a loose cannon who could easily damage his chances.

Analysis: If Kerry can pull off victories in both Iowa and New Hampshire, his campaign will come off life support and rally the "anybody but Dean" vote. Kerry needs for Gephardt, Lieberman and Clark to drop out of the race quickly, because he doesn't have the stamina or the funding to outlast them.

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Dick Gephardt

Gephardt is a 26-year veteran of the House of Representatives, representing the state of Missouri (which borders Iowa). As the Democratic Party's leader in the House, Gephardt steered Clinton's budget proposals through Congress, helped enact campaign finance reform laws, and has been a consistent supporter of American farmers and labor unions. Gephardt voted in favor of the Iraq war, but has since criticized Bush's handling of the reconstruction.

Strengths: Gephardt won the Iowa caucus in 1988, when he last ran for President, and has a veteran campaign organization there. His protectionist stance and universal health care plan appeals to voters who feel threatened by economic uncertainty.

Weaknesses: Gephardt is a loyal, hard-working, and widely admired party leader, but he lacks the crucial ability to spark passion—his supporters admire him, but they don't put their lives on hold and campaign for him. He is at least partially to blame for the Democrats' poor showing in the 2002 mid-term elections.

Analysis: Gephardt will withdraw after the New Hampshire primary.

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John Edwards

A trial lawyer serving his first term in the Senate, Edwards represents the East Coast state of North Carolina. Edwards has run an issues-oriented campaign with comprehensive proposals on taxation, health care and education reform.

Strengths: Edwards is a dynamite public speaker, and he's running a campaign with an optimistic message. His campaign has avoided personal attacks, and he is slowly rising above the fray as the other candidates drag themselves into the mud. Everyone expects him to be back in 2008 or 2012.

Weaknesses: His youth and inexperience make him a fresh face in the primaries, but would likely count against him in a general election. Bush operatives would have a field day with his trial-lawyer background. He has very little foreign policy experience, and the first candidate to turn his guns on Edwards will pop him like a balloon.

Analysis: Look for Edwards to become a rising star in the Democratic Party, but not to win this year's nomination.

---

Joe Lieberman

Lieberman was Al Gore's running mate in the 2000 election, and is a third-term Senator from Connecticut (near New Hampshire). He was among the first Democrats to condemn Bill Clinton's behavior during the Monica Lewinsky scandal, and championed the creation of the Department of Homeland Security. He supported and still supports the Iraq war.

Strengths: He appeals to "liberal hawk" voters who strongly supported the war but are less enamored with Bush's domestic policies.

Weaknesses: Lieberman's support for the war is a tough sell to Democrats who want a lot of daylight between their standard-bearer and George Bush. Lieberman skipped Iowa to focus on New Hampshire, where he'll be overshadowed by Clark and the Iowa winners; without a New Hampshire victory to breathe life into his campaign, and without Gore's support in 2004, Lieberman has little hope of winning the nomination.

Analysis: Lieberman will withdraw after the New Hampshire primary.

---

Dennis Kucinich

A Congressman from Ohio since 1994, Kucinich is best known for his campaign promise to remove American troops from Iraq within 90 days of taking office.

Strengths: By refusing to bolt for the Green Party, Kucinich encourages the 2.74% of Americans who voted for Ralph Nader to stick with the Democrats in '04.

Weaknesses: While a significant number of Americans may feel that Bush misled them in the buildup to the Iraq war, the overwhelming majority realize that it would be the height of folly to withdraw our troops now. Bush would easily defeat Kucinich in a national election.

Analysis: Kucinich will use his might-defect-to-the-Greens card as leverage to extract a few promises, but then fall faithfully in line behind the party's nominee.

---

Al Sharpton

An African-American minister from New York, Sharpton is best known to national audiences for a 1987 incident involving an African-American teenager named Tawana Bradley, who falsely accused a group of white men of rape.

Strengths: He appeals to African-American voters, particularly in New York.

Weaknesses: He is not taken seriously as a candidate, being perceived more as a kingmaker-wannabe than an actual contender for the nomination. Sharpton has so many skeletons in his closet that it's a wonder he can fit any clothes in there.

Analysis: He will extract what promises he can from the party's eventual nominee, and then throw his support behind that person.

---

The Iowa caucus will begin about 12 hours from now, and we should know the results by mid-afternoon, local time; the polls are showing a dead heat between Kerry, Dean, Edwards and Gephardt, but Dean and Gephardt have much stronger teams on the ground, which is important in a caucus. (A caucus is a series of "town meeting"-style events across a state, each of which selects a candidate according to a set of rules that probably made more sense back in 1880 when they started doing this. A primary is just like a regular election, except that it chooses the nominee. Also, caucuses allow preferential voting under some conditions, so it may be important who your second choice is; primaries and general elections in the USA do not use preferential voting.)

Hope this helps illuminate something, other than the fact that I have too much free time. Stay tuned for a post-Iowa analysis of who's likely to win the nomination.

- Posted by Scott Forbes at 8:00 am. comments.

Saturday, 17 January 2004

I Fought the Law: Of all the blogs I've discovered over the past few years, the one that never ceases to amaze me is Howard Bashman's How Appealing. Day in, day out, the man takes a topic that by all rights should be deathly dull — appellate litigation — and makes it enjoyable, informative, and even educational for an engineer like me. If someone had told me two years ago that I'd be reading federal appeals court decisions for the entertainment value, or that a site dedicated to that narrow topic would rank among the web's most popular destinations, I'd have never believed it.

That said, I am going to destroy Howard Bashman in the Best Australian Blog competition. Why, you ask? Because I'm actually in Australia, that's why! Who the heck nominated a blog about the U.S. legal system as the best darn blog in the Land Down Under? (Not that I'm exactly dipped in vegemite myself, what with being an American and all, but at least I'm here in Oz, gosh darn it!)

I don't care how many times Bashman sends his swarming minions to the polls: I'm going to beat him anyway. You hear me, Howard? I even cover Australian legal issues, in a completely haphazard and incomplete fashion! How can you possibly compete with that, huh? Huh? Didn't think so.

I'd withdraw and spare myself the embarrassment, really. There's just no contest.

- Posted by Scott Forbes at 11:16 am. comments.

Saturday, 17 January 2004

Three months later the photos from my six-week vacation to Japan, Sweden, Germany, Singapore, Malaysia and the Czech Republic (not in that order) are finally online. (Check the blog archives from October and November for some on-the-spot blogging from various exotic places.)

My photos are all free for the taking under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs-NonCommercial license; you don't need my permission to use them in your non-commerical newsletter, web site, or other work, provided you (1) give me a photo credit and (2) use your own bandwidth. (There's a home page on the Free Republic web site linking directly to one of my photos of Cambodian torture victims [and using it as the punch line for a joke about a local homeowner's association, I think], which is why I bring this up.)

- Posted by Scott Forbes at 5:17 am. comments.

Thursday, 15 January 2004

Piiigs… iiinnn… SPAAAAACE! I'd be the first in line to support a serious proposal for revitalizing America's manned space program—but when the proposal arrives sandwiched between two billion-dollar helpings of election-year pork, I begin to suspect that space exploration isn't really the goal here.

I'm a big, big believer in Dr. Robert Zubrin's "Mars Direct" proposal for a manned mission to Mars. Zubrin, an aerospace engineer, worked out a plan for visiting Mars that is dramatically cheaper and simpler than the alternatives: It uses the Martian atmosphere and high school-level chemistry to manufacture rocket fuel on Mars, allowing spacecraft to arrive with empty tanks and refuel for the return journey. Given NASA's budget, Zubrin's plan could not only send men to Mars but establish a permanent base there within ten years.

Bush's plan, like his father's, calls for a mission to Mars. It also calls for a space station on the moon, retiring the shuttle, building a next-generation spacecraft, and apparently for sending every registered voter in Texas, Florida and Alabama on a joyride into orbit. Like Bush's other proposals, it has no provisions for how to fund these wonderful things—except for the dangerously popular "borrow the money from Japan and China" technique, which has become our approach for everything from Medicare to immigration. Supply-side economics were irresponsible in the eighties; when the baby-boomers are a few short years away from draining our federal treasury dry, they're a recipe for ruin.

So, while I'm glad to see NASA getting attention and publicity (and goodness knows the agency could use a little revitalizing), I'm not impressed by yet another brazen attempt to buy my vote—and with borrowed money, no less. We'll talk about space travel when the government is on a sound financial footing again, but right now I want a return to fiscal sanity more than I want a return to the moon.

- Posted by Scott Forbes at 11:32 am. comments.

Tuesday, 13 January 2004

It's effective because it's true.

- Posted by Scott Forbes at 10:38 am. comments.

Tuesday, 13 January 2004

Why you green-blooded, inhuman— I stopped reading Steven Den Beste several weeks ago, after one of his Tolstoy-sized epics began with the disclaimer "This is preposterously long"—the idea of an article so long that Steven was obliged to issue a warning sent me screaming off to Instapundit for some short and pithy right-wing blogging. Since then I've skimmed a few of Steven's more digestible novels, but I haven't really paid full attention.

I think what Steven has been saying lately, though (in his own uniquely wordy way), is that we're living in a Harrison Bergeron world, and the players are divided into three camps:

• The Harrison Bergerons (a.k.a. the Right) are the strong, powerful types that the other two groups want to keep in chains. They have rational minds, believe in equal opportunity (but not equal outcome), want to achieve their fullest potential, and think of the less fortunate as weak and inferior beings.
• The George and Hazel Bergerons (a.k.a. the Left) are slavishly devoted to equality of outcome, even if it means that everyone is held to the lowest common demoninator. They're willing to handicap themselves in order to "make things fair" for the disadvantaged, and they value consensus regardless of whether it's right or wrong.
• And the Diana Moon Glampers-es (a.k.a. "the Islamists") would rather see Harrison dead than allow him to soar above his fellow beings. In Vonnegut's story, Glampers is a government official called the Handicapper General, but she suffers from no self-imposed hardships; she merely imposes them—forcefully—upon others.

At least, these are the nuggets of content I've panned out of a river of authentic frontier gibberish (p-idealism? Transactional possessives?) that Steven has penned as of late.

---

John W. Gardner was the founder of Common Cause—a public-interest group dedicated to public accountability and open government—and was the Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare under President Lyndon Johnson. Gardner wrote a book which I highly recommend to anyone concerned about "equality of opportunity" vs. "equality of outcome:" Excellence: Can We Be Equal and Excellent Too?

Gardner recognized a few basic points about the two kinds of equality that are worth repeating here: Equality of opportunity, while highly desirable, is often impossibly difficult to measure by scientific means. You can't get an MRI scan of the hiring manager's head that will tell you whether she's screening by qualifications or by color, and human beings are differentiated in so many ways that it's almost impossible to isolate the variables. You can't find a person who is identical to yourself in every aspect but gender, and then run you both through some double-blind tests in order to have a control variable.

Equality of outcome, on the other hand, is seductively easy to measure: You just divide people into categories and then compare the percentages to the general population. Simple. Reproducible. Scientific, to an extent—although the Harrison Bergerons of the world will immediately shout out "correlation does not prove causation!" and be justified in doing so. Science (or, more properly, the "scientific method" of experimentation and peer review) doesn't offer nearly as many tools for investigating a situation that can't be reproduced and repeated: There isn't any way that a model of "global warming" can be proven, for example. We can just go around in circles indefinitely, questioning the initial assumptions of the modelers, until the earth either boils or freezes over—at which point somebody will be proven right, but it'll be too late to take action.

Gardner also recognizes that "equality of outcome" should not be a goal in itself, although a reasonable concern over outcomes is healthy for our society: If failed business ventures led directly to starvation, there'd be a lot fewer entrepreneurs… and if there isn't any movement from poverty to wealth and vice versa, then society stagnates and becomes politically unstable. True equality of outcome, if enforced, would remove all incentive for excellence and leave us with a lazy man's socialism: The hardest worker and the least competent slacker would both get the same paycheck. What we (as a society) really want is equal outcomes for equal input, which is extraordinarily difficult to measure, and which leads us into all sorts of difficult gaming-the-system traps.

Gardner didn't offer any pat answers to this dilemma, because there aren't any; he did argue, though, that the underlying ambition should always be to produce excellence in every endeavor—that a society which passively accepts mediocrity was already in a state of decline.

---

Going back to Steven's dissertation—which, as I understand it, will be concluded with a third part (Return of the King?) sometime in the near future—I'm obliged to point out: Steven is setting up an elaborately detailed straw man, for what will undoubtedly be an epic demolition. Steven's caricature of the lit-crit professor in his ivory tower, turning his back on the scientific method and spinning out subjective jargon/babble for other solipsists to digest and validate, is what you get when the Right fantasizes about the opponent it would most like to debate. This isn't going to lead to any valuable insights about the gap between Left and Right; it's not even going to lead to a reasoned, objective examination of opposing views.

- Posted by Scott Forbes at 9:18 am. comments.

Tuesday, 13 January 2004

Lost opportunity. Last month I wrote that President Bush had a window of opportunity to capitalize on Saddam's capture, and announce changes to his Iraq policy from a position of strength: Like Lincoln after Antietam, Bush had a rare chance to issue proclamations that at other times might have been dismissed as desperation.

But where Lincoln took advantage of the opening provided by Antietam, Bush has allowed the leverage he could have gained from Saddam's capture to slowly ebb away without any action on his part. Having Saddam behind bars boosted initiatives that Bush had already begun, such as James Baker's arm-twisting junket to convince foreign leaders to forgive Iraqi debts—and, of course, it helped our troops' ongoing efforts to establish the rule of law in Iraq. But Bush didn't capitalize on the moment of Saddam's arrest to announce any new policies or improve existing ones.

Bush could have presented a timetable for Iraq's first democratic elections, a plan to reconstitute the Iraqi army, or even recycled his ill-timed speech from November announcing a shift in U.S. policy and our newfound desire to promote democracy in the Mideast. (Imagine how much more effective that speech would have been, had it come on the heels of Saddam's incarceration!) In mid-December Bush could have enacted these policies and thrown a combination punch at his political foes; instead he landed a glancing blow, one that Dean and company will shake off before November. In another month Saddam's capture will be old news (if it isn't already), and Bush may be defensively explaining how our armies got into the briar patch—or why he diverted our troops from more pressing concerns, such as the continuing pursuit of Osama.

In any case, changes to Iraq policy will now (once again) be spun as evidence that Karl Rove is desperately trying to shore up Bush's polling numbers in time for the elections. The window has closed, and Bush missed the opportunity.

- Posted by Scott Forbes at 7:15 am. comments.

Monday, 12 January 2004

If Russell Crowe can win American movie awards… then apparently I can be a nominee in the 2004 Australian Blog Awards, in spite of my distinct lack of Australian-ness. (I'm in Australia, yes, but I'm not of Australia, if you know what I mean. Then again, I am a permanent resident now—and the other nominees include both an Aussie in Japan and the ubiquitous Howard Bashman, who at last count was an American citizen based in Philadelphia who blogs about decisions of the U.S. appellate court system. What was I worried about again?)

I'm not sure what the prize is (a Dave Winer-shaped statuette?) but of course (ahem) it's an honor just to be nominated.

Memo to self: Take out full-page ad in Variety, send out screener copies of blog…

- Posted by Scott Forbes at 10:45 am. comments.

Monday, 12 January 2004

"70% of success in life is showing up." Believe it or not, the Howard Dean campaign is mobilizing here in Sydney, Australia. Regardless of your political views, you have to admit that Dean and his team have reinvented the modern election campaign (and, possibly, the modern Democratic Party): No one will run for office in the future without studying Dean's techniques.

I think it was back in October when I first read that the Dean campaign was using meetup.com to organize its supporters. Out of curiosity I visited the site, and discovered there were about a dozen Dean supporters in the Sydney area; they were trying to organize their first meeting, and didn't quite have the numbers to pull it off (a meetup requires at least five RSVPs).

So I signed myself up. I hadn't made up my mind yet on a candidate, but I wanted to see first-hand the results of Dean's little experiment in applied democracy: How would it work? What could American expats in Australia possibly do that would make a difference to the Dean campaign, aside from sitting way over here on the sidelines?

The November meetup came and went, without enough people in Sydney to have one. But in December there were exactly enough RSVPs: We had the minimum of five, and no more. I had signed up for something called "meetup plus" when I registered (it was an extra $20—I chalked it up to research), so I was nominally the host of the meetup, and dutifully printed out the materials the Dean campaign sent me. I also brought along all the information I could find about requesting an absentee ballot from overseas, since I figured anyone living abroad would need to know that.

Five people attended December's Dean meetup in Sydney: Myself, three people from the Australian media (!), and the head of the Democratic Party's expat chapter in Australia. We had a lively off-the-record discussion of Dean's campaign and American politics in general, which didn't do very much to boost Dean's chances in Iowa or in November—but you know the old saying about how avalanches start: One pebble at a time.

Last week we had the January Dean meetup, with nine people in attendance. Most had never been to a political meeting before, and their enthusiasm ranged from fence-sitters to passionate Dean supporters. We're sending hand-written letters to undecided Iowa voters (won't they be surprised by the airmail stamps) and talking about how we can reach out to other expats.

Somewhere along the way (in life as well as this narrative) I started referring to "Dean supporters" with words like we and us. It's surprising how that can happen; heck, it's downright amazing that it can happen, considering that I'm over 10,000 miles from Vermont and (until now) my political activism had been limited to voting. (Admittedly I've been writing about politics quite a bit lately, but this is also a recent development: When I lived in the States I mustered up just enough energy to vote every couple of years, but otherwise I was a bystander at the coliseum.)

Every human being has the desire—the need—to be a part of something that is greater than themselves. It's a permanent condition of the human spirit, and it motivates people to move mountains. When Howard Dean gets up in front of an audience and says his signature phrase, "you have the power," he is speaking directly to that want. And I respect and admire him for that, even as I may disagree with some of Dean's positions (which, I'm sure, I'll be writing about in the future). In no small part, though, I've gotten involved in the Dean campaign because I could—and because the Dean campaign made it easy. You just have to show up.

- Posted by Scott Forbes at 10:38 am. comments.

Tuesday, 06 January 2004

Public beta: Alert reader Joshua Scholar is the first, including myself, to realize that I accidentally enabled comments earlier this afternoon. I've been fiddling around behind the scenes for about a week now, trying to get the Blosxom "writeback" plugin ready for prime time, and I inadvertently left it turned on when I posted my most recent article.

The plugin still has a few configuration issues, though (as Joshua was also first to notice, alas): I've managed to quickly fix the problem where paragraph breaks were being ignored, but the counters that show the number of comments per entry are still not updating in real time. (I also suspect that comments will look terrible on any style sheet other than the default one, but I haven't had time to check this yet.) I suppose having the comments "go live" will give me an incentive to fix these bugs right away, rather than procrastinating for another week… so, depending on your perspective, my blunder might be considered a good thing.

Anyhoo, I am delighted to discover that people are leaving comments, even if the technology isn't all there yet—I think I secretly suspected that my readership consists of my immediate family, four other bloggers, and LiveJournal's jackslack, so I'm glad to know that other people are reading, and to provide a forum for debate. (I should probably develop a comments policy or something; for now just pretend that my mother is reading the comments, since she probably is.) I'll see what I can do about smoothing out the rough edges, but in the meantime feel free to kick the tires.

Update: I think it's ready for prime time now (or, at least, no less ready than the rest of the blog). Jeff from Canned Platypus has also confessed that, although his blog is named after an item found in every tourist-trap souvenir shop from Sydney to Perth and back, he isn't actually an Aussie or an expat… so I've updated my blogroll to respect truth-in-advertising laws, and while I'm at it to include some new and interesting expat voices. (Besides, how can I not link to a blog named A Geek in Korea?)

- Posted by Scott Forbes at 11:13 am. comments.

Tuesday, 06 January 2004

An Officer and a Scoundrel: On occasion I've read some thought-provoking articles by one Ralph Peters, a retired Army Intelligence officer. Peters has shown himself capable of intelligent, coherent debate on the subject of Mideast policy, for example; I don't always agree with everything he says (heck, I don't always agree with everything I say), but until now I respected him as a rational person whose insights were worth reading.

Until I read this lapse of judgement in today's New York Post, that is. In a paroxysm of rage and loathing, Peters has unloaded his bile ducts into a vile op-ed piece about the Howard Dean campaign: He compares Dean to Hitler, Dean's supporters to the Brownshirts, and Dean's Internet campaign to the Gestapo. Listen to this:

Dean was already practicing the Big Lie. Montreal was just a stop on his journey from Munich to Berlin. He was already looking around for his Leni Riefenstahl.

Listen to Dean's rhetoric, especially on security and international issues. He never offers specifics; it's all hocus-pocus. He knows how best to deal with terrorists. We voters from the humble Volk need to take it on trust.

This is not the stuff of which a rational argument is made. Nor, for that matter, does it contribute to a discussion of the various Presidential candidates and their merits. It is, in fact, exactly the sort of thing that Ralph Peters would condemn (while a chorus of Bill O'Reillys and Glenn Reynoldses tsked in outrage) if it showed up at, say, MoveOn.org in a homemade campaign commercial by some random nobody.

But apparently if the same odious comparisons are directed at a Democrat, and with the same lack of evidence to justify them, that's just fine and dandy. No problem there. Heck, we don't even need to assume that the author is some no-name minority of one: A paid columnist of the Post can compare Howard Dean to the Führer, and apparently no one will blink an eye.

If I took these same paragraphs, and changed one word in each…

Bush was already practicing the Big Lie. Montreal was just a stop on his journey from Munich to Berlin. He was already looking around for his Leni Riefenstahl.

Listen to Bush's rhetoric, especially on security and international issues. He never offers specifics; it's all hocus-pocus. He knows how best to deal with terrorists. We voters from the humble Volk need to take it on trust.

…the Right would be screaming to high Heaven. If Robert Fisk or Noam Chomsky or one of the Right's other whipping-boys had written the above, you'd have read about it by now in every blog from here to Tacitus and back.

You're a hypocrite and a scoundrel, Ralph Peters. You're a symptom of a larger problem, where the extreme Left and Right of our political spectrum have given up trying to work with—or even speak to—each other. Instead they trade charges of treason and fascism across the no-man's-land of the political center, turning our elections into winner-take-all contests that deny our democracy the free exchange of ideas. I had once thought Ralph Peters held to a higher standard than that, but in the future I'll regard his words with the same low esteem I give to Ann Coulter or Michael Moore: Just another clown in the demagogue circus; not to be taken seriously.

- Posted by Scott Forbes at 1:33 am. comments.

Friday, 02 January 2004

Vote early, vote often. If you're an American citizen living abroad (like me), it's time to mail in your 2004 request for an absentee ballot—don't wait until the week before the polls open, because it'll be too late by then. Visit the Federal Voting Assistance Program (FVAP) web site, download the instructions for the U.S. state you last lived in, and mail in the forms with your signature. It takes all of ten minutes and a stamp.

If you're not already registered to vote, then (a) shame on you, and (b) the site also has instructions on registering to vote from overseas, although this is slightly more difficult (the requirements vary by state). I don't care whether you're a Democrat, Libertarian, Free Soil, Whig, or even a (shudder) Republican—you should participate in the grand American experiment in democracy, no matter what your political stripe.

The 2004 election could make a huge difference in the lives of Americans living abroad, to say nothing of everyone else. Don't miss it!

- Posted by Scott Forbes at 4:06 am. comments.

Thursday, 01 January 2004

Secrets and lies. While John Ashcroft's recusal from the Valerie Plame investigation made waves throughout the blogosphere, the other story that broke this week got little ink from our circle of pundits: Condi Rice is trying to avoid testifying under oath before the federal commission investigating the 9/11 attacks.

There's a reason why our National Security Adviser might not make full disclosure when answering certain questions, or why she might not even be able to answer them in public. There is one legitimate reason, and it is this: The answers to certain questions might reveal to Our Enemies things that We The People would prefer they didn't know. For example, if someone were foolish enough to ask Rice "Do we currently have a mole inside Al Qaeda?", then Rice would be justified in refusing to answer; we wouldn't want to reveal to Osama that a member of his inner circle was on our side. Not now. Maybe in 2040 when it's a moot point, but not today.

But, aside from the case where the public good requires a private confidence, there is no other reason why a United States Government official can justify keeping secrets from the American people. (There is one other reason for the government to keep a secret—to respect a citizen's right to privacy, on something like tax returns or medical records—but that doesn't apply here.) Representative democracy requires accountability to the people; without it, we have no basis for deciding how to choose our representatives.

The question of when a government official can lie to the people is even more extreme: Aside from an actual battlefield maneuver (the D-Day invasion, say, or Iraq's "Shock and Awe" campaign), I can't think of any reason that a public servant could justify lying to the public. It mocks the idea of a well-informed electorate, and violates the principles of a government by the people; it opens the door for unethical politicians to take advantage of our trust, and to use "national security" as an insincere ploy for putting their own petty interests ahead of ours.

With that in mind, I have no sympathy for Condi Rice's desire to avoid testifying under oath. The people have a legitimate, bipartisan interest in understanding the events that led to the 9/11 attacks, and how we might prevent terrorists from succeeding again in the future; this isn't a partisan witch hunt in disguise, unlike certain other "investigations" I could mention.

I really can't see how the public interest would be served through Condi Rice lying to the 9/11 commission—and I can't think of any other reason why Rice would seek to avoid testifying under oath. I have no qualms with Rice or other officials responding to a question with "I can't reveal that information at this time," but seeking to evade the oath outright is simply seeking to evade the legal consequences of breaking the oath.

The oath is there for a reason, and the reason is to protect the public interest. I'd like to see Rice take it.

- Posted by Scott Forbes at 11:39 am. comments.