Here’s what I just bought myself for Christmas:

…a 2004 KTM 950 Adventure. And I didn’t even have to go to Oregon to get it.

This morning, I was just taking a break from some meetings and finally catching up on the news; I look at the date and realize that it is November 22.

If you’re of my generation (born in ’53) or older, that date is a pretty powerful one; today is the anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

In a certain sense, his brief (and really not terribly effective) presidency marks the apogee of post-war American confidence. We may have been worried that the Russians might nuke us, but somehow we were filled with a kind of optimism that we could make it though, and not only make it through, but make it better.

I attribute no small part of that to the systemic collapse of leadership – both in the quality of being able to lead, and of being able to be led – in our society.neo-neocon sent me a link to her recent post on leadership, which was a good read. I’ve felt for a while that the old balance between erecting statues of leaders and pulling them down has been upset somehow in our day.

Personally, I blame celebrity (then again, I blame celebrity for everything). We balance out view of others with positive and negative opinions. My belief is that the positive – which once was held by a respect for or awe of leaders – has been replaced by the simple handwarming over the glow of celebrity, which is much more ephemeral and which we know means less.

Here I’ll also suggest that we go to Habermas’ ‘Legitimation Crisis‘ – Damn!! Now I need to go reread it! – to talk about how Western, Enlightenment society consumes the social structures which create and sustain legitimacy.

I’ll suggest that Kennedy was the last political ‘leader’ we’ve known in America. His legacy – realized and unrealized – is something we’re living with today. I believe that until Democrats can work through that legacy, we will be like Bill Clinton, emulating the form of his behavior without ever capturing the substance.

And more, I think that we need to revisit and think hard about why it is that we expect our society to function when we entrust the levers of power to people more worried about being torn down than about accomplishing anything.

Just got an email from my Representative in Congress, Jane Harman:

Subject: Needed: A strategy for an exit from Iraq

Here’s the email I just sent her office in response:

Dear Rep. Harman:

I just received your email titled “Needed: A strategy for an exit from Iraq.”

I’m disappointed that you’d choose to frame this serious issue in such a thoughtless way. The very phrasing of the question suggests your priority: bring the troops home safely. Sadly, the only way to keep our troops safe is not to use them, and to withdraw from the conflicts spanning the globe – conflicts which have already touched our shores, and which risk not only our security but that of our allies as well.

Here’s an alternative phrasing which meets the same goal – Subject: Defining victory in Iraq. How do we know we’ve won?

There’s a very legitimate set of discussions to have around this issue, and one which I’ve publicly criticized the Administration for not leading. You have the opportunity to lead where they have failed – but not if your leadership is focused entirely on how to get out quickly with minimal loss of life and face.

Instead, if we have some concrete goals, we can have the simplest exit strategy of all: victory.

Like most of the blogosphere, I’ve followed the problems Pajamas/OSM has had during their launch. I’ve made some concrete suggestions directly to them where I hope they may do some good, because I’d very much like them to succeed – a rising tide will lift all blogs, as they say. I believe that bloggers who are rooting for their demise are making a mistake, and that their failure – like the failure of any blogger or blogger-backed venture – would hurt us all.

Because I’ve been directly named in this, I think I need make some kind of simple statement about this whole sheebang.First, I was involved in the founding of Pajamas, as readers here will know. I left when it became clear to me that the business strategy I was interested in – providing technical, financial, and marketing ‘plumbing’ and making it available widely to blogs in what Jeff Jarvis would call an effort “to use tags and microformats and social interaction to link together the topics and opinions and information people care about on that distributed web” of blogs – wasn’t the strategy that the other two founders, Roger and Charles, and their investor were interested in pursuing, and that their strategy didn’t make me passionate either. My feeling then as now was that they were better off as a smaller group in close agreement as to their goals, and they deserved an opportunity to implement their business strategy as they saw it, which I believe they are doing.

We parted amicably, if sadly, in my case. Under the spirit and letter of our agreement, that’s about all I’ll have to say on the subject.

I’ve still got a bunch of ideas and some designs and relationships in this space that I’d love to play with, and would love to connect with some other entrepreneurial, engaged folks who have some interest in this stuff. Drop a line at the address above, or leave a comment.

I’ve got a few posts in the queue expanding some thoughts on these issues (the open/edge web vs. the closed/core web) and will try and get them out over the next few days (unless I fly to Oregon to pick up a new motorcycle).

We’ll now return you to regular blogging.

This internal Washington Post chat transcript raised a few eyebrows last week, but one thing struck me and didn’t seem to get brought forward, so I thought I would point it out…

Jonathan Yardley: The comment of mine two paragraphs above has been leaked, presumably by someone in the newsroom, to the New York Times. Katharine Seelye called me an hour ago pressing for further comment. I declined, stressing that this is a confidential internal critique written solely for the news staff of TWP and refusing to authorize her to quote from it. She called back half an hour later to say that her editor had told her to go ahead and quote from the comment anyway. I told her I expected her to make plain that this is a confidential internal document and that she is quoting from it over the objections of the person who wrote it. She said she would. We’ll see.

I hardly see any point in having critiques and comments if they are to be publicized outside the paper. How can we write candidly when candor merely invites violations of confidentiality? Many readers say they distrust us. Well, now I find myself wondering if we can trust each other.

This is just so amusing I almost don’t know what to say.I guess he expected professional courtesy…can you imagine what the press would be saying if someone in the White House or Congress were to make the same claim?

Oh, wait – they have, in this interview with Leonard Downie, executive editor of the Washington Post:

Some have charged that the press has gone too far in ferreting out information, but Downie comments: “If you take careful surveys of this sentiment, you find that people are upset for one of two reasons: it [the press] has held up in a bad light someone or something they care about, or the investigative stories get too far into ordinary people’s privacy, and readers feel personally invaded. But if you ask the same people who are offended by these stories if they want more investigative reporting, they always say they do.”

Downie is aware of the responsibilities that go along with investigative reporting. “You’re always balancing the public’s right to know with the right of privacy,” he says.

I don’t think that he’s talking about “critiques and comments.”

So why were they rioting in France? I discount the jihadi theory; I tend to think that bored, angsty kids tend to take up the banners of romantic nihilists pretty consistently; those old Huey Newton posters looked kinda cool in French dorm rooms as well.

The French are politically progressive, officially antiracist, and yet somehow a sullen underclass has grown in the suburbs. How did that happen?

Well, let me tell you a personal story that may cast some light on the subject.
After grad school my French then-girlfriend and later first wife and I went and spent some time in France. I was finishing my master’s thesis, and we both had vague notions of coming and living in France. Now she was a smart cookie (not too smart, given that she married me…) who had a degree in Aerospace engineering from ENSAE in Toulouse, and a Master’s in Math from Berkeley. Her dad was a senior executive at a huge French corporation. So she was talented and connected.

And she decided to leave France because she didn’t think she could get a good job.

And as for me getting a good job in France…except with a multinational or a US Corporation, forget it. I wasn’t a member of the ‘club’ – hadn’t gone to the right French schools, wasn’t from a good family (although my in-law family could and would have helped).

The reality is – that like all bureaucratically driven societies (with both public and private bureaucracies) who you know is the be-all and end-all of access and ultimately a good predictor of success.

Take a look at this story in the BBC about the only Arab to head a French public company, Yazid Sabeg.

Yazid Sabeg is a rarity among France’s business elite. He is North African. And those two facts, he believes, are not unconnected.

“A lot of people don’t like my face,” says the 55-year-old industrialist.

Whether or not corporate France is “viscerally racist”, as Mr Sabeg contends, it certainly lacks diversity.

The chief executive of CS, a big communications group, he is the only person of North African origin to head a leading French company.

His father, an Algerian worker, came to France in 1952. Young Yazid studied hard and worked as a civil servant before setting up his own finance company.

In the early 1990s Mr Sabeg took over CS, a contractor in the sensitive field of secure communications for defense and aerospace.

The takeover met with fierce resistance. “The establishment, notably the military establishment, did not like it,” he recalls.

In 1991 intelligence services wrote a scathing report about Mr Sabeg, based on false rumours that he was financing Algerian militants.

Again, who you know. For the smallest business, you need permits, leases, financing – and the reality is that access to those is extremely limited for the African and Arab residents of the cite.

One advantage of the American model is our openness; it matters who you know, but a whole lot less than anywhere else.

That’s a feature, not a bug.

I’m a GooGoo (Good Government) fan from way back. As someone who believes deeply that government has always had powerful role to play in shaping society, I’m obviously forced to confront the times when that role is abused.

I’ve believed for a while that the direct financial ties between GOP lawmakers and regulators and the laws and rules they write would be fertile ground for a Democratic party that could clean up its own act.

Sadly, it looks like that’s not going to happen.

On the margins, we’re seeing some scandal-slinging by the Democrats, but the issues never rise to the level they should because the slingers are so nakedly partisan that the charges can readily be dismissed.

Here’s a case in point:

Over at the Huffington Report today, one of the lead stories is headlined:

DeLay, Hastert, 31 Other Politicians Paid-Off By Indicted Lobbyist Abramoff To Help Block His Clients’ Rival Casino…

Now in case you’re not following things closely, Tom DeLay and Dennis Hastert are Republican Congressmembers from Texas and Illinois.

Let’s click through to the AP story, which opens with the following:

Nearly three dozen members of Congress, including leaders from both parties, pressed the government to block a Louisiana Indian tribe from opening a casino while the lawmakers collected large donations from rival tribes and their lobbyist, Jack Abramoff.

and goes on to point out what Hastert did:

House Speaker Dennis Hastert, an Illinois Republican, held a fundraiser at Abramoff’s Signatures restaurant in Washington on June 3, 2003, that collected at least $21,500 for his Keep Our Majority political action committee from the lobbyist’s firm and tribal clients.

Seven days later, Hastert wrote Norton urging her to reject the Jena tribe of Choctaw Indians’ request for a new casino. Hastert’s three top House deputies also signed the letter.

followed closely with what Democratic Senator Harry Reid did:

Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid sent a letter to Norton on March 5, 2002, also signed by Sen. John Ensign (news, bio, voting record), R-Nev. The next day, the Coushattas issued a $5,000 check to Reid’s tax-exempt political group, the Searchlight Leadership Fund. A second Abramoff tribe sent another $5,000 to Reid’s group. Reid ultimately received more than $66,000 in Abramoff-related donations between 2001 and 2004.

The AP headline, by the way, was

Lawmakers Acted on Heels of Abramoff Gifts

So how freaking partisan and cheap a shot was it for the HuffPo folks to take to rewrite the headline as they did – focusing instead on two Republicans?

Look, people get to be partisan and take partisan shots. Democratic drum-beater Josh Marshall is raising funds to hire a muckraking researcher. How much muck do you think will get raked about John “MBNA” Moran?

But there’s a serious cost to this, which is that the voters see the sleaze-flinging as partisan noise, and ignore the real decay and filth that’s slowly accumulating.

The GOP is too firmly tied to its corporate sponsors to institutionally change anytime soon.

The Democrats could do well in this case – by genuinely doing good.

I’m not holding my breath or anything, but a fella can hope.

Update: The new headline is:

“AP: 33 Politicians Received Total Of $830K From Indicted Lobbyist Abramoff And His Clients To Block Rival Casino:” Cool. wonder if other folks complained, or Arianna is reading WoC…

I’ve been working on what I hoped was a balanced and thoughtful response to my buddy Brian Linse’s unfair effort to tar everyone on the pro-war side as jingoists (yes, my accusation is overbroad, but so is his).

Then I read this in today’s New York Times and decided to chuck thoughtfulness and fairness right out he window.

Vietnam Archive Offers Parallel to War in Iraq

White House advisers convene secret sessions on the political dangers of revelations that American troops committed atrocities in the war zone, and whether the president can delicately intervene in the investigation. In the face of an increasingly unpopular war, they wonder at the impact on support at home. The best way out of the war, they agree, is propping up a new government that can attract feuding elements across a fractured foreign land.

…and my initial response was “Well, f**k, let’s just give up, then.”

Because if Iraq is Vietnam, then three things are true:
# We’re on the wrong side of a brutal and senseless war.

# We can’t possibly win it.

# And a bunch of people who got stiffies when they saw “All The President’s Men” will become truly insufferable as they live out their adolescent fantasies of Speaking Truth To Power and Bringing Down The Man while driving BMW’s and Audis and dining at Cafe Milano.

Fortunately, we can make some reasonable arguments that suggest that the first two don’t hold a lot of water.

Vietnam was a textbook war of National Liberation; Vietnam had been a colony of the Chinese and then the French for a really long time, and they wanted their own country.

Ho Chi Minh approached Harry Truman at the end of WW II and asked to become a U.S. protectorate, like the Philippines, as a way of getting out from under the French. We turned him down, and he went to war to kick out the French, and sought and received Russian and Chinese assistance to do so. The path to freedom, the Vietnamese people believed (somewhat mistakenly) led through the occupying U.S. armies.

Iraq – unless like certain professors I know of, you believe that everything is best understood through the lens of Western imperialism – is very different. The path to freedom and independence doesn’t lie in casting off foreign domination – it lies in casting off domestic tyranny.

There are arguments made that we could have won the Vietnam War, had we persisted. I’m not sure I buy them, but having read Chang’s book on Mao and the Chinese guerilla wars, I’m more convinced that guerilla wars without a conventional army are less effective than we have mythologized them to be.

There are facts on the ground that paint a picture far different than that painted in the New York Times; it’s certainly impossible for me to say – and may be impossible for anyone to say – which is true.

That’s what history looks like while it’s being made.

KING HENRY V

I tell thee truly, herald,
I know not if the day be ours or no;
For yet a many of your horsemen peer
And gallop o’er the field.

I’ve been criticized in the past for suggesting that the core of our policy in Iraq ought to be “we won’t quit.” (and I’m very pleased that Bush seems to be doing at least one thing right, as in his speech he said that “We will never give in, We will never accept anything less than complete victory.” I kind of liked that…)

To those who’ve been gently (and even not gently) critical of this view, let me offer this L.A. Times story as some explanation of why I keep holding fast to my position:

Some Insurgents Want a Deal, Politician Says

Some Sunni Arab insurgent groups linked to Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party are putting out feelers for a negotiated end of fighting in exchange for a timetable for a U.S. pullout from Iraq, a former government minister asserted Saturday, amid fresh signs that upcoming elections have altered the country’s political climate.

…

“They are eager to start talking, and the United States should take that initiative and start moving,” Samarrai said.

Political solutions are inevitable, he said. “Nobody can crush anybody with weapons alone, and everybody knows that. We have to start talking. Let everyone sit and solve it, for God’s sake, because we are dying here like crazy.”

Samarrai acknowledged Saturday that the groups he was referring to — Sunni nationalist and “patriotic” groups, many linked to Hussein’s former regime, army and security services — form just a part of the insurgency. The U.S. believes they are responsible for the bulk of roadside explosions, car bombs and ambushes targeting coalition troops and security forces.

Note that I absolutely support negotiations, as I absolutely supported negotiations with the Sinn Fein…but negotiations with a clear and bright line – political disagreements, yes; violence, no.

A great dinner at Ocean Seafood last night with a fun and engaging collection of bloggers.

Everyone seemed to have a good time (except for the whole ‘waiter bringing the live fish by for us to inspect before they fried it‘ thing. Several folks felt that we now had a personal relationship with the fish, which made them uncomfortable when it was served. I’ll note didn’t diminish the speed with which it was devoured)

Great food, beer, excellent and good-humored company and a lively and usually friendly chat.

I hope we do it again soon.