By its violent nature, war inflames our emotions. As humans, we have reactions that are in part biological as well as deeply ingrained through our cultures, and the naked confrontation which leads to war as well as the violence embodied in it trigger those emotions.

bq. “I have often preached that the proper antidote to fear is anger, and I see no reason to change my opinion on this. However, there is another mental condition that serves as well or possibly better, and that is concentration. I have discussed this matter at great length with people who are in a position to know, and I am not without experience of my own, and I can state positively that when you find yourself facing deadly danger, your ability to concentrate every mental faculty upon doing what needs to be done to save yourself leaves no room for fear.” — Col. Jeff Cooper

bq. “In strategy your spiritual bearing must not be any different than normal. Both in fighting and in everyday life you should be determined though calm. Meet the situation without tenseness yet not recklessly, your spirit settled yet unbiased… Do not let your spirit be influenced by your body, or your body be influenced by your spirit. Be neither insufficiently spirited nor overspirited. Do not let the enemy see your spirit.” — Miyamoto Musashi

Much martial arts training, and much military training (as I understand it) is about learning to manage those emotional reactions. But note that ‘managing’ them is not to completely deny them…Because, in truth, they serve as an engine for the human reluctance to confront or to risk and commit violence.

When faced with confrontation, hatred, or violence, part of our human nature is to withdraw, to look away, to act like prey – not predator. Another part reacts aggressively.

The question in any instance is which is the appropriate reaction?

In this case, we’re taking about the anger in response to the events in Falluja – and let’s make one thing clear; the events are not simply the attack on and killing of the civilian guards. That’s tragic, but in most of our worlds would have been a blip. It was the brutal treatment of their bodies once they were helplessly dead, in defiance of Islam, which like most religions, requires a certain respect for the dead.

So we’re angry. And to an extent, it’s important that we have some anger, because otherwise we would be helpless.

And to that extent, when we see things like suicide bombings, when we remember the images of 9/11, anger’s not a bad thing. It is, as Cooper says, far better than fear.

But in the actual conflict, in the actual decision to fight and fighting, I’ll take Cooper’s ‘concentration’ and Musashi’s ‘settled yet unbiased’ spirit. Showing anger – standing in front of the enemy or potential enemy, and frothing at the mouth in rage – does two bad things. First, it helps create a fight where it might have been possible to avoid one. And second, if your enemy is at all strong, it shows weakness.

One of the things that the Arab media shows me, with their constant displays of rage, is how weak the Arab world really is.

That doesn’t mean we have nothing to fear from them, and it’s not a suggestion that we ignore them.

Because, as I’ve noted, an eleven-year old with a shotgun still warrants your attention and reaction.

But if we want to win – which I’ll define as coming out on top without turning the Arab world into rubble – we’ll do it in the spirit of Jeff Cooper and Musashi.

I’ve been looking for a way into the Little Green Footballs v. Daily Kos issue, and it’s hard.

We’re dealing with pretty visceral emotional reactions at the same time that we’re trying to maintain some sense of moral clarity, and those are not easy things to do.

But I thought of something that happened this weekend, and it shed some light on the question, so I’ll open with a brief story.

TG took a motorcycle riding class held on a racetrack here in Southern California (I’ll be slightly evasive on exactly which one, where, so forgive me, but we’ve been to most of the big schools), and I was her pit crew (and I’m not bitter about not getting to ride, no I’m not at all bitter…). This involved hanging out, reading two good books, intermittent flurries of activity on her behalf, worrying a lot (there’s an interesting post on that), and chatting with folks, as I tend to do.One guy I chatted with was the father of an AMA professional road racer who has recently retired, whose son – a 15-year old – was interested in following in his father’s footsteps. The boy had a successful career in other kinds of motorcycle racing, and was ready to start roadracing, and so was at the class polishing his skills (he was, thank God, in a more advanced group than TG was). The grandfather was an unbelievably neat guy; he called me on my anxiety when TG was out on the track, and got me to sit back and relax and enjoy myself, and we chatted about racing and kids and marriage and life for much of the day.

At the end of the day. when we’d packed the bikes onto the trailer and were headed home, I stopped by his motor home and said goodbye, and wished him and his grandson success. I complimented him grandson, pointing out that he was amazingly polite, helpful, and just overall a good kid.

“Yeah, he is,” the grand-dad said proudly. Then his face changed, and he added, “but I worry that he’s too nice to succeed as a racer, and that’s something he really wants to do.”

Too nice to succeed. An interesting thought. But it makes sense to us; you automatically understand what it means, and it helps me put a frame around the questions that I’ve been wrestling with for the last few days.

Looking at the discussion we’re having – the criticism I leveled at Kos, and the responses from commenters here, Nathan Newman and others – it seems like we’re really talking about three things.

First, why is it OK for us to be cruel, and not OK for them?

Next, what is the place of anger in conflict?

Finally, is it legitimate for us to be angry at the Arab world or elements of the Arab world?

This is turning out to be longer and messier than I’d intended, and I don’t have time to do as good a job of editing as I’d like, so let me just jump into the first question today, and follow up with the others tomorrow.

Nathan Newman challenged those who criticized Kos by posting a graphic image of a dead child and asking why that child’s death didn’t spur the same level of outrage as the deaths of the American civilian guards, and by extension, why the deaths of Iraqi civilians in the crossfire in Falluja last week didn’t outrage us.

The answer to Nathan’s question is, in no small part, that we’re not that nice. We don’t value all lives lost the same way; we value ours more than theirs, those murdered more than those killed in accidents, and so on.

And the reality is that it’s impossible to value all lives equally.

If we did, we could never go to war. Some people might think that’s a good thing; but there are other people in the world who aren’t that nice, and they would then win; they would force us to do their will and we’d be back where we started. I believe that; others disagree; they see our not-niceness as the cause of the conflicts, not a defense against them, and in large part, that defines the boundary between the two sides in the conflict over this war.

But it’s not only war. If we valued all lives, no one would smoke, or drink, or engage in risky sports, or eat anything except tofu and lentils.

Every decision we make kills someone. Every dollar we spend is a dollar that doesn’t save a starving child, everything we buy leaves a trail of pollution, exploitation and death behind.

My father built high-rise buildings. He probably lost a worker on every third or fourth project; he was devastated when it happened. We would go to the funerals. But it isn’t possible to build buildings like that without risk.

I ride motorcycles; in my circle of fifty or so riding acquaintances, we’ve had 4 deaths in six years.

My oldest son wants to join the military and fly jet fighters. In reality, flying them is riskier than fighting in them.

I value TG more than myself; I know that I would die to protect her. And yet I sat by when she took her motorcycle out onto a racetrack and rode. I did that because there are some things more important than life itself; the freedom to express yourself and to act, for one.

So we do accept deaths as a consequence of what we do.

Making political decisions involves accepting deaths, too.

How much will we spend on emergency medical care versus home heating subsidies? How much will we spend on food stamps for the elderly versus prescription drugs? How much energy will we spend on creating jobs and how much on preserving the environment? Each decision means deaths; from disease or injury, from cold, from malnutrition (the elderly poor still suffer from that); from uncontrolled illness, from unemployment and descent into poverty, from illness caused by environmental conditions.

I’ve made a point of criticizing much of the modern left because of it’s desire for purity; for the belief that they can, somehow, stand apart from what Sartre called ‘the filth and the blood’ of living in the world. I said:

A long time ago, I talked about the moral importance of hunting… that I felt it somehow wrong for people to both eat meat that they buy in the store and yet somehow they deny their responsibility for the life that was taken for their consumption. For me, having hunted somehow solves this problem…I have taken the responsibility, I have had my hands up to the elbows in the bloody mess, and changed something from an animal to meat for my table.

But when I read much of what comes from the left, I’m left with the feeling that they want to consume the benefits that come from living in the U.S. and more generally the West without either doing the messy work involved or, more seriously, taking on the moral responsibility for the life they enjoy.

We enjoy this life because a number of things happened in the world’s (our) history. Many of them involved one group dominating (or brutalizing or exterminating) another, or specific actions (Dresden, Hiroshima) whose moral foundation is sketchy at best.

“Do you think one can govern innocently? Purity is a matter for monks, clerics, not for politicians. My hands are dirty to the elbows. I have shoved them in filth and blood,” Hoederer says in Sartre’s ‘Dirty Hands’.

Part of political adulthood is the maturity to realize that we are none of us innocents. The clothes we wear, money we have, jobs we go to are a result of a long, bloody and messy history.

I see my job as a liberal as making the future less bloody than the past.

But I accept the blood on my hands. I can’t enjoy the freedom and wealth of this society and somehow claim to be innocent. I don’t get to lecture people from a position of moral purity. No one spending U.S. dollars, or speaking with the freedom protected by U.S. laws gets to.

I want to make the future less bloody than the past; that may mean accepting my responsibility for the blood shed today.

That’s not a nice position to take.

But it doesn’t put me on a par with Islamists, and that matters.

It doesn’t for two reasons. First, because on a basic level, the world is divided into teams. One point I’ve also made in the past is the attachment of the modern left to cosmopolitan values, as opposed to patriotic ones.

On one level, that’s a good thing. Sharing the humanity of the rest of the world means something, and means something good. But as I’ve also talked about, there is a real value in patriotism, particularly the unique patriotism of America, which is based on shared values and not blood and soil.

Many on the left reject it, as Schaar pointed out:

Opponents of patriotism might agree that if the two could be separated then patriotism would look fairly attractive. But the opinion is widespread, almost atmospheric, that the separation is impossible, that with the triumph of the nation-state nation. Nationalism has indelibly stained patriotism: the two are warp and woof. The argument against patriotism goes on to say that, psychologically considered, patriot and nationalist are the same: both are characterized by exaggerated love for one’s own collectivity combined with more or less contempt and hostility toward outsiders. In addition, advanced political opinion holds that positive, new ideas and forces–e.g., internationalism, universalism; humanism, economic interdependence, socialist solidarity–are healthier bonds of unity, and more to be encouraged than the ties of patriotism. These are genuine objections, and they are held by many thoughtful people.

And those thoughtful people, by virtue of their attachment to the wider world, cannot take sides; they can’t view the tragedy of an American soldier’s death as deeply different than the tragedy of an Iraqi soldier’s death. They are one and the same; and so are paralyzed. They can’t make a decision because all deaths weigh the same.

They don’t weigh the same to me.

I value ours more than I do theirs; I value them most of all because they are fighting for me and the values which have created me and given me the life I enjoy. Yes, I value them because they are ‘like me’ as well, but the Pakistani troops who die fighting Al Quieda are, in the context of their own politics, fighting for me and my values as well. I don’t see the sides as morally equivalent, and even if I had opposed the invasion of Iraq – which I almost did – I wouldn’t see them as morally equivalent.

I feel for the deaths done to innocents; to children, woman, and men whose only wrong was to be in the wrong place in the wrong time. To me the enterprise of war is inherently tragic, and that tragedy is nowhere more represented than in these deaths.

But like the deaths we choose when we decide on healthcare policy – which are no less tragic for being less visible and shockingly photogenic – they are an inevitible consequence of the decisions we make. I’ve read a lot of history, some of which was military history, and I’ll point out that in all wars, from Attic Greece forward, innocents have suffered.

I’m proud of our military that they work so hard, and take such risks to minimize that suffering.

I’ll note here that there’s an interesting (if frighteningly depressing) theory that one reason why we will have so much trouble rebuilding Iraq is that we didn’t damage the civilian infrastructure enough, and that the civilians didn’t suffer enough. I’m a ways away from that position, but at some point, it’ll be something worth discussing.

But the reality is that there’s no way to pick apart what we want (and I think need) to accomplish and some quantity of suffering. Personally, I want to minimize the aggregate quantity of it.

But if there is a trade between ours and theirs, I’ll take theirs. Because I do believe that there is a ‘them’ and an ‘us’.

Next, the place of anger.

Not one of the Top 5 Dylan songs I chose made it onto Norm Geras’ Top 20.

Not one.

Statistically, that’s unlikely, although it may have something to do with Mike A’s comment on my disconnect from mainstream pop culture.

My picks were:

# If You See Her, Say Hello (Blood On The Tracks)
# Tears Of Rage (Basement Tapes)
# Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door (Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid – a cheap one, I know, but I still love it)
# I Pity The Poor Immigrant (JWH)
# I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight (JWH)

Update: Charles links over and a hockey match ensues in the comments below. More debate here, as Joe joins the scrimmage.

Folks, if you go to the comments, you’ll see that I’ve edited out a series of comments centering on the notion that LGF should be shut down or sanctioned because it promotes ‘hate speech’.

Sorry, not on this pitch; that’s not a topic of discussion I’m interested in having on one of my posts. Regardless of my bias toward (or against) any blogger, I’m not in the business of shutting people down.

If any of you post on this again, I may elect to ban you.

For all the visitors from LGF, I’m glad you’re here and hope you stick around. Our place is somewhat different from Charles’; think biker bar and college bull session. Each of us (there are a bunch of authors here) control the comments on our threads, and I tend to be fairly ruthless in criticizing and at some point banning people who don’t want to make arguments, but want to have them instead. Hope you browse around and we’re interested in what you have to say.]

I’ve been corresponding with ex-blogger (come baaack!!) and uber-commuter Ann Salisbury about the whole Kos issue, and snce she suggested it, I think I’ll just post our last emails:

…I didn’t get the impression that Nathan was cheering by posting the pic, but setting it out there for what it was — which, in my mind, is tragedy, plain and simple.

I can’t see any violence being “better” than another, but I can see “justified” or “more justified” violence. Self-defense and defense of others is usually “more justified,” but even the law in the United States requires that the perceived threat giving rise to the self-defense be a reasonable perception. (For example, “He looked at me funny,” just doesn’t do it.)

Glad to see you’re working through the hard stuff – and I appreciate you sharing it, because it’s helping me to work through it too.

-Ann

This was in reply to my message:

I’m breaking the issue into two basic areas:

Is our violence better than their violence? And if so, why?

What is the place of hate in conflict?

I’ve met Charles, and he’s a liberal who was shocked by 9/11 into reading Arab media, and shocked by what he saw there. I really do think he’s provided a service in opening that up to wider discussion, and I think he’s damaged the service that he does by allowing his comments to be as bile-filled as they are.

I think that the good thing about our side is that we’re willing to accept the humanity of everyone – including our enemies, which is why we grieve, not cheer, at the picture on Nathan’s site. When we stop doing that – as Kos did, and as many of Charles’ commenters do, we erode our own standing.

A.L.

From the Washington Post:

Very young children who watch television face an increased risk of attention deficit problems by school age, a study has found, suggesting that TV might overstimulate and permanently “rewire” the developing brain.

For every hour of television watched daily, two groups of children — ages 1 and 3 — faced a 10 percent increased risk of having attention problems at age 7.

We haven’t had TV (with brief periods of cable connection) since my oldest son was born. I can’t tell you how much I recommend it.

Littlest Guy just invented a game involving a chessboard, Lego parts, and dice today and taught it to me. That’s what kids do when they aren’t sucking on the glass teat (sorry, Harlan)

It’s going to be a helluva week in Washington.

WASHINGTON, April 4 The leaders of the independent commission investigating the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks agreed Sunday that evidence gathered by their panel showed the attacks could probably have been prevented.

Their remarks drew sharp disagreement from one of President Bush’s closest political advisers, who insisted that the Bush and Clinton administrations had no opportunity to disrupt the Sept. 11 plot. They also offered a preview of the difficult questions likely to confront Condoleezza Rice when she testifies before the panel at a long-awaited public hearing this week.

…

Also appearing on “Meet the Press,” Karen P. Hughes, one of Mr. Bush’s closest political advisers and an important strategist for his re-election campaign, rejected the suggestion that the attacks could have been prevented.

“I just don’t think, based on everything I know, and I was there, that there was anything that anyone in government could have done to have put together the pieces before the horror of that day,” Ms. Hughes said. “If we could have in either administration, either in the eight years of the Clinton administration or the seven and a half months of the Bush administration, I’m convinced we would have done so.”

While reading that, don’t under any circumstances forget to go check out Phil Carter’s take on Clarke:

As for Mr. Clarke’s argument regarding Iraq, I closed his book without having been persuaded by his argument. He did not marshal enough evidence to persuade me that the Bush Administration had deceived the American public to march towards war, or that it had considered (and disregarded) all of the strategic costs of the war. That’s not to say that these things aren’t true — only that Mr. Clarke’s book didn’t do a good job of making these arguments. Similarly, I was unimpressed by Mr. Clarke’s argument that the war in Iraq has been a distraction from the war on terrorism. With his knowledge of this issue, I expected a detailed breakdown of all the ways that the war in Iraq took away resources, political capital, and focus from the domestic and foreign war on terrorism. I found that argument to be lacking as well. He did not, for example, discuss how intelligence assets devoted to finding Iraqi WMD might have been devoted to finding Al Qaeda personnel and equipment. Nor did look at the resource-allocation problem with his NSC-trained eye, in order to make the argument the billions spent on Iraq might have been otherwise programmed for homeland security.

Damn. Now I have to go read it.

This isn’t remotely the last one, or even the worst that we will face. Resolve and sitzfleisch are what’s called for at this point.

Here’s where it started:

In an ominous development that threatens to widen the rift between Iraq’s Shi’ite majority and the occupation forces, Sadr told his supporters yesterday to “terrorise” the enemy as demonstrations were now pointless.

“There is no use for demonstrations, as your enemy loves to terrify and suppress opinions, and despises people,” Sadr said in a statement distributed by his office in Kufa, south of Baghdad.

But Shi’ite spiritual leader Ali Al Sistani appealed for calm and urged Shi’ite demonstrators to resolve their differences with coalition forces through negotiation.

More as it develops…and my thoughts are with the troops and innocent civilians. May this pass quickly and safely for them.

I have no personal animus toward Markos Zuniga; I don’t know the guy personally, and up until now, my major Post-It abut him was that I thought it was cool that someone was bridging the gap between this amateur political discourse we do in the blogosphere and electoral politics.

He’s always been a bit strident and chest-beating, but I’ve chalked that up to personal style (or, on my more cynical days, the kind of extreme posturing that gets attention).

He crossed a line with his now-infamous comment, and that’s changed my view of him.

Since we don’t know each other, that’s a kind of ‘so what?’ comment. Except for one big and one little thing.
The big thing is simple; in my view, there’s good and bad. Good involves peace, justice, liberty (from exploitation as well as oppression), and the fundamental acceptance of the humanity and value of everyone – and bad involves the opposite. In my view, the constructive dialogs are ones among people who have different views of how to attain Good, and different visions of exactly what it looks like, manifested in the messy world of reality.

Was invading Iraq the best path from here to there? Were there better alternatives? What are the alternatives today, and how do we decide among them? Those are things that I believe people on the side of Good can discuss – even debate heatedly and struggle over politically.

But, in my mind, there’s a pretty clear line between Us and Them. Being with Them is about supporting blowing up busses and pizzerias – not as criminal acts, not as errors of negligence or simple chance, but as core acts; acts that define who you are and what you do. Being with Them is about torturing and murdering captives, not fattening them up and teaching them to snorkel (and yes, I know Guantanamo is worse than that – but it’s better than the fate of the soldiers in the Ramallah police station).

On this blog, one of our co-bloggers crossed that line with a comment extolling the terrorist bombing of the UN headquarters in Iraq. Joe, to his credit, asked Trent to step away from the blog for a while because the sentiments he expressed were so deeply against what Joe and this blog (and by extension, I) stand for that no other reaction was possible. Trent was (and is) a valuable member of this community, as much as he and I may disagree, but with that comment…

And similarly, Kos stepped neatly across the line with his comment, and has only walked further away from it with his actions since (redirecting the link to the comment, pulling the post it was attached to off his blog, his non-apology, and his most recent response, in which he says something stupid and the evil minions of the underworld attack him for it).

Does that mean we’re better than he is?

I’ll step up and say yes.

Look, we all say and do stupid things on occasion (some more than others, of course). But what’s missing in Kos is the notion that what happened to him is anything except a political ambush by his enemies.

And that, in turn matters because Kos is plugged deeply into current Democratic electoral politics, as one of Joe Trippi’s advisors in the Dean campaign, in the Clark campaign, in the Joe (“it’s the Jooos”) MBNA Moran campaign.

I’ve said in the past – and been harshly criticized by people who probably agree with most of my policy beliefs (except Iraq, no doubt) – for criticizing the left for ‘not loving America’. I’ve talked about what a left that does love America might look like – or what it’s philosophical roots might be.

And I’m told, over and over again, that I’m setting up straw men.

No, I’m not.

And that matters, both because many of those I oppose are, I believe, on the wrong side of the divide above – but because they have and will take the left down with them.

Reading the comments on the Kerry blog about the delinking of Kos is informative.

If I were a GOP tactician (and I assume they already are, because they do this for a living) I’d be planting the seeds about the cash Kos had bundled for Kerry, and asking ‘will it be returned?’

And if it is, we’re about to see an internecine battle which will guarantee the White House to Bush.

(it’s late, and I’ll add links in this tomorrow morning)

One of the things I do with my time is to ride motorcycles; not only for transportation here in congested Los Angeles, but for fun as well. I’ve spent some time on racetracks (Willow Springs, Sears Point, and Laguna Seca), and consider myself a good street rider (albeit a worse than mediocre racer), and have some appreciation for what it takes to sit on a vehicle moving pretty fast (in my case about 140).

The grown-up racers, the guys racing at the top of the sport, are running well over 210mph these days. Imagine that I’m tucked in going 140, all full of myself and how fast and daring I am … and then one of them goes by me as though I was standing still on the side of the freeway.

The world champion last year (and the year before, and the year before that, and …) is a young Italian named Valentino Rossi. Rossi is famous for three things:* His incredible skill on a motorcycle;

* His outrageous antics – and I do mean antics. He once won a Grand Prix race, then pulled to the side of the track and ran into a portajohn set up for the track workers, and came out dressed as Robin Hood. He doesn’t seem to take it quite as seriously as him competitors do;

* His general joie de vivre – as opposed to the mechanical seriousness from most professional athletes, he comes across as a guy who just can’t wait to wake up tomorrow and go do it some more. The pressure of a $17 million contract must have some effect, but it isn’t an obvious one.

And this year, he’s done the wildest thing of all.

After winning 125cc and 250cc World Championships for Aprilia, he went to the big leagues for Honda in 2000 – at the age of 21. In 2001, he won the World Championship, as he did in 2002 and 2003, all riding Hondas.

And this year, he changed brands and teams, and will be riding a Yamaha. Yamaha’s best finish last year was, I believe, fourth place. Honda motorcycles dominated the series (with Ducati maintaining some presence, while Yamaha, Suzuki, Aprilia, Kawasaki, and Proton lagged behind).

So he left a team that would have essentially guaranteed him another World Championship for one that had not yet had a competitive motorcycle. An Australian journalist writes:

Why would a man who has just won his third world championship leave the team that had brought him such dominance in favour of an inconsistent, underachieving operation that had not produced a world champion in 11 years?

The most recent time a Yamaha rider had dominated the tracks was back in 1992 (Wayne Rainey), and in the ensuing years, a succession of Hondas, ridden first by Mick Doohan and then Alex Criville, and finally Rossi himself, had taken the championship.

The only interruption to the Honda reign was Kevin Schwantz’s 1993 title and Kenny Roberts jnr’s triumph in 2000, both riding a Suzuki. Roberts’ victory came in the year that a then 20-year-old Rossi was making his debut in the 500cc class, then motorcycling’s top category.

Rossi finished second in the title race that year, but never again was Roberts, or anyone else for that matter, to give him much trouble as he became the last 500cc title winner in 2001 and the first man to take out the new four-stroke 1000cc MotoGP category in 2002 and 2003.

At the time of his departure last year, Rossi simply said he was bored with the domination he had achieved on his Honda, and needed a fresh challenge.

Some believed he was chafing at the demands being made on him by Honda. Others — including his former mentor and boss of Honda Racing Corporation, Doohan — suggest the reportedly $17 million a year pay cheque had prompted his desire to switch camps.

Rossi disagrees. In an interview on his personal website, he said: “There was nothing to prove. It was just that the motivation riding for Honda had finished, we won three world championships in a row, we won at favourite tracks, at my least favourite tracks, and in all conditions, so what was left to do?

Hemingway made a simple distinction between sports and games; a sport can kill you. I have a more than healthy respect for the risks racers like Rossi take; but to me the sportsmanship shown in his latest decision – to walk away from a sure thing and give himself a new challenge – is really far more wonderful than the daring he shows on the track.

Now for the Good News. Last weekend, the teams had a final shakedown before the first race of the season. April 17 in South Africa. On the track at Catalunya, Spain, all the leading teams came out to test their machines and setup.

The final results?

1. Valentino ROSSI, Yamaha, 1:44.571
2. Alex BARROS, Honda, 1:44.631
3. Nicky HAYDEN, Honda, 1:44.634
4. Colin EDWARDS, Honda, 1:44.653
5. Sete GIBERNAU, Honda, 1:44.669

One last point before we switch over to Good News.

Guys like Roger Simon, Michael Totten and I are always being accused of demonizing the left by painting it with the colors of its most extreme members. “That’s not really the antiwar movement. Other than a few extremists…” etc., etc.

It’s hard to be much more mainstream than Markos Moulitsas Zúniga (Kos); he was involved in the Dean and Clark campaigns, and is building a political consultancy that works on national Democratic campaigns.

So, as we were saying…