Lots of folks are pointing to the new TNR blog, Iraq’d. I’m of two minds on it (as I am on many things), so let me hit the three points that define the gap.

The blog opens with a strong statement:

If you’re a pro-war liberal, chances are you’re probably feeling burned right now. The case for the Iraq war rested on three pillars: The danger of Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction, with the clock ticking on a nuclear capability; the danger of Saddam Hussein’s connections to Al Qaeda; and the human rights imperative of deposing one of the world’s most despicable regimes and assisting newly-freed Iraqis in building a democracy. Well, it turns out that Saddam didn’t have much in the way of WMD, or even ongoing WMD programs. And it also appears that his ties to Al Qaeda were tenuous at best. So all that’s left for the war rationale is the human-rights-and-democracy argument, which for liberals is intuitively appealing (or should be).

Uh, no. In fact, hell no.

The case for the war in Iraq was made on September 11, 2001, in New York City. Earlier, less powerful arguments had been made in Beirut, the Red Sea, Dhahran, and again in New York City. The notion that each of the increasing in scope acts of terrorism against Americans and American interests was an independent act is a charming conceit, much like that which suggests that the rash of murders that periodically break out in disputed gang territories are individual acts of passion.

We are confronted with a multinational terrorist enterprise that has declared war on us. Much as I might ignore a twelve-year old who announces his intention to rob me, and even treat his efforts to attack with amusement when they are limited to taking swings at me as I hold him away by his forehead, I am likely to feel and act differently when he shows up with a loaded shotgun.

We have to dismantle this terrorist enterprise, and to do so will take a long time, a lot of money, and not a few lives. Some of them will be American, although I wish it were not the case.

I believe that we will not win until we manage to dismantle the philosophical outlook and social conditions that have bred it, but that while we figure out how to do that we also need to keep the bad guys away from our homes.

I believe that the Clinton Administration – who I disliked because I felt they had sold out to corporate interests and were not populist or liberal enough to suit my politics – did a pretty good job of mobilizing international sentiment and working the international system. The FBI, for all its failings, worked damn hard to bring the terrorists they could find to justice, and met with not a little success.

But it didn’t stop 9/11. And little that they proposed or could have done would have, because 9/11 was a doctrinal failure. It was a doctrinal failure at a tactical level on three of the four planes, where the passengers did what they were supposed to do and sat and waited for the grownups to take care of things. And it was a doctrinal failure at a national security policy level as well, because the international efforts and criminal prosecutions hadn’t blocked the growth of the movement.

The national security doctrine failed because as long as the terrorists had the tacit support of state actors, our criminal justice system and the international criminal justice system were essentially helpless.

So we had to remove that support.

On March 16, I wrote:

…I believe the answer is to end the state support of terrorism and the state campaigns of hatred aimed at the U.S. I think that Iraq simply has drawn the lucky straw. They are weak, not liked, bluntly in violation of international law, and as our friends the French say, about to get hung pour l’ecourager les autres…to encourage the others.

Now this may seem like a week reed on which to base a war.

But it is stronger than it appears.

First, there is a legitimate case for regime change in Iraq, regardless. I’ll refer the reader back to Salon in 1998…

And nothing since then has come close to changing my mind.

The war was briefer and less bloody than I anticipated, a testimony to the effectiveness of our men and women in the military (soon to be joined by my son).

The aftermath, while chaotic, and less simple than some may have wished, is moving slowly in the right direction. I certainly held no illusions that Tikrit would, a week after we invaded, suddenly become Anaheim. This is going to be a long, slow, painful, and messy process. And what we need more than anything is an ‘iron butt’ – the clear willingness to simply sit it out and win.

And here, the Iraq’d blog has a point to make.

But then along comes the Bush administration’s November 15 Agreement to relinquish sovereignty by June 30, which tells the Iraqis that, owing to election-year considerations, the United States can’t be bothered right now to midwife a democracy. You might say you’ve been Iraq’d.

…

One of the premises of Iraq’d is that the U.S. decision to cease nation-building jeopardizes our own national security as well as Iraq’s. After all, if we believe that Iraqi democracy would be a model for the region, then the converse is also true: If we leave behind a failing state in Iraq, then we provide Middle Eastern autocrats with a pretext for cracking down on the reformers and liberals in their midst, since they can point to the chaos in Baghdad as the likely fruit of democracy. And since Islamist terrorism feeds in part on Middle Eastern tyranny, then we’re in a lot of trouble.

Yes. In fact, hell yes.

I also wrote:

Look, for me it’s simple. I’m willing to overlook a lot of what I don’t like about the Bush Administration because I believe that he’s the only candidate whom I believe (today) is resolute about this whole war thing.

The second it looks like he’s planning to ‘declare victory and leave,’ I can promise you that Atrios will look like Karl Rove in comparison to me.

That’s because I’m convinced that decision leads almost certainly to nukes in the U.S. and then the real possibility of a genocidal war abroad.

Now on one hand, I tend to have a high tolerance for ‘fluff’ or spin; it’s the language of modern politics. And it’s certainly possible to make pronouncements about how things are to be turned over o the Iraqis by a deadline of X, and mean it in the narrowest legalistic sense, as a sop to both the Iraqis and to the opponents of the war here in the US.

But I’m damn concerned that that’s not what’s going on, and there I’m happy to see Iraq’d holding the Administrations collective feet to the fire.

On the third hand…

There’s something disingenuous about the antiwar left that, on one hand, howls at the human and financial cost of the war and occupation, and with the next breath, busts Bush for cutting and running.

I don’t know this blogger, and don’t know his or the magazine’s history on the war. But when the anti-war, anti-Bush side (and note that I haven’t begun to get my head around this election yet) plays this game, it’s somewhere between annoying and infuriating to me. It’s dishonest at best, and if that’s in fact what’s going on I mean to call people on it.

Lots of people are talking about the collapse of the Dean campaign – and a collapse it certainly has been. While the race to the nomination isn’t nearly done, there’s no other word for what happened to him. I wanted to toss in my $0.02 by suggesting a few things to consider.

First, people have talked about the ‘echo chamber’ effect of the online tools the campaign used; I think it’s not so much the fault of the tools as a misinterpretation of reality on the part of those who used them.

Here’s the model:If there is 1.5% of the market that’s predisposed to buy what I’m selling, and I have good tools to get to that 1.5% – because they already read the media that I advertise in, or already use the tools that I intend to reach them through – I can go from 0 – 1.25% of the market pretty damn fast. The mistake, of course, is in assuming that I can continue that trend in any kind of a linear fashion.

The busted dot-coms typically made the same mistake; they went from 0 – 10,000 customers in six months, so obviously in 36 months, they’d have 60,000 – or even more as they built momentum! Not quite so obvious. I call that ‘the miracle of compound interest. If I model the future and assume a growth rate of W%/year on a base of X, relative to a growth in costs of Y% on a base of Z, well it’s pretty clear that I ought to be ordering my G-IV in about 2009.

Dean got a huge lift because he tied into an existing base of people who share certain political and social characteristics, and could build his support in that group amazingly fast using new peer-to-peer techniques enabled by web technology.

He stalled because he assumed he could keep doing the same thing in a linear fashion, and mentally ‘bought the G-IV’. In fact, once he fully mobilized that base, he did a piss-poor job of leveraging them into other ‘layers’ of the polity. My example of his shout-out to his San Francisco cadres in his speech after the New Hampshire primary is an example of speaking into the core of the existing support, not thinking about how to widen it.

First, you need to understand that in my view the model for the voting public isn’t a uniform mass, or a granular one, but a layered one. There are geographically dispersed communities of interest, taste, and belief. West Los Angeles has more in common with the West Side of Manhattan than it does with Inglewood or even Culver City. When I travelled last week, I talked to Jeff Jarvis in Manhattan, and met with Rob Lyman in Charlottesville and Scott Talkington in Arlington VA. The four of us have a lot in common; we read the same media, are interested in the same issues, and in essence, form a part of a geographically dispersed (actually, a spatially dispersed, since it’s possible to talk about nonspatial geographies) community.

Had he used the volunteer energy and cash he raised to thoughtfully pick another lateral slice through the voter community and gone after it – using web tools, but with a strategy carefully calibrated to go past his ‘Deaniacs’, he’d have been able to add another layer, and still been in the race.

It’s obvious that the race is still fluid, and that Kerry has some huge vulnerabilities. Dean may mount a comeback. But he won’t do it if he keeps doing what he’s been doing to date.

From CNN:

BUTLER, Pennsylvania (AP) — A judge ordered a woman to carry a photo of the man she killed in a head-on collision, and the man’s parents complied by sending a picture of him in his casket. Now, her lawyer is crying foul and the family is refusing to provide another picture.

Prosecutors said Jennifer Langston was drunk and talking on a cell phone in June 2002 when she crossed the center line and hit a pickup truck carrying teacher Glenn Clark and his pregnant wife, Annette. He died, his wife remains in a coma and their son, born by Caesarean section five months after the crash, is being raised by relatives.

Besides vehicular homicide, Langston pleaded guilty in September to reckless endangerment and reckless driving. A judge sentenced her to 30 days in jail, plus house arrest and probation, and ordered her to carry a picture of Clark for five years.

She got 30 whole days in jail?? But wait, there’s more…

Clark’s parents gave court officials a photo of their son in his coffin.

At a hearing Wednesday, Langston’s attorney, Michael Sherman, said the “spirit of the agreement” was that the photo be of Clark when he was alive.

“It was very unreasonable and cruel that she was given that picture,” Sherman said.

He must mean something different by ‘cruel’ than I usually do.

As some of you know and others may have discerned, TG has consented to marry me in March.

I’m obviously happy as can be, and as soon the psych evaluation her friends have demanded is done (really guys, she’s not crazy for marrying me…), we’ll be buried in wedding plans. We’re doing a couple of truly cool things I can’t disclose in order not to blow the pseud, but I can tell you that I’m truly looking forward to the party.

Since I started blogging here, I’ve spent a lot of time emailing and talking to Joe, but I have never met him. Yet.

I’m hoping he can be here for the event.

Sadly, times being what they are, the trip isn’t in Joe’s budget, and so I’m asking you – our readers – to hit his PayPal button below in order to bring him here to L.A. for the Wedding. Once we reach our goal and raise the required funds, we’ll turn it off.

I was listening to the radio as I drove from DC down to Charlottesville (where I am right now, having enjoyed a great evening with former blogger and frequent commenter Rob Lyman who is another in the string of smart fascinating people I’ve met through blogging), and Scott Ritter was on, pointing out that of all the analysts, his take on Iraqi WMD was the closest to what we’ve found.

He gets some points for that, in my view.

But…He was asked what the accusation that he’d been “bought by the Iraqis” was based on, and he explained that it was baseless, because an Iraqi-American had used his own money to finance Ritter’s $400,000 documentary “On Shifting Sands”. I remember wondering as I drove “Hmmm. Wonder where the Iraqi guy got his money.”

Today I got my answer.

ABC news published a list of the people who got money from Saddam’s Bribes for Oil program, and among them…

“Shakir Alkhalaji: 10.5 million barrels of oil, sold at below-market prices”

. That would be the same guy who financed Ritter’s movie.

So now I’m left with a second question; how did the budget for the film break out? What did Ritter get as a producer’s fee?

And, if he was bought and paid for, even indirectly, how does that effect my views on what he said?

I’m sitting here in my hotel in Charlottesville watching Bill Maher’s new show, and I’m kind of stunned. As I keep mentioning, we don’t have TV in the house, and so this is all new to me.

Reading about the show, the common theme that I saw was that Maher’s wit and intelligence would bring back a certain kind of intelligent discussion abut politics.

The only intelligent discussion I saw was from actor Sean Astin – the guy from the LotR series. WTH??

Maher is the guy (and you all probably know this better than I did) who stepped in it when he said on his old show that Atta and the other 9/11 attackers were “brave” in the form of their attacks, while Clinton had been less so for just lobbing over some cruise missiles.

The show tonight has comedian Larry Miller – an old friend of Maher’s, a young woman (who never got a name label) who is a Republican strategist, and actor Astin.

The crowd – or the laugh track – cheers and laughs loudly at whatever Maher says – while groaning whenever one of the panelists disagrees with him.

Maher has some mildly witty comments on Administration foibles, attacks the Iraq invasion, using the relatively typical arguments – and overall, my response to him is, I’ve heard it all before. I’ve heard it at a thousand dinner parties in West Los Angeles, and Maher is a perfected example of the model.

The guy I want to have dinner with is Astin – hobbit Sam – whose comments are surprising, personal, and somehow feel genuinely thoughtful. I have no idea what his politics are, but I’d like to find out.

So my uncle has cancer. A particularly nasty one, but he somehow caught it early, and so he’s on the good side of a nasty probability curve. They’re well-off, and live near New York, so he’s getting treatment that’s at the edge of the state of the art.

Once a week he gets chemotherapy now (down from once a day), and once a day radiation therapy. For the last three days, I’ve driven him in, to give my aunt a break and to get some time with him one-on-one.

And I’ve been introduced to an amazing community, and to the very best of human nature.

It turns out that the appointments are at set times, and so he’s always there with the same group of people and their caretakers, and they have a kind of a club. He had to introduce me when we came in, and I sat with the other patients and caretakers and listened to them talk, because they do talk a lot.

And I’m stunned by something, by the grace and kindness and care that they take with each other. My aunt and uncle have a place in Mexico where they usually go for the winter; they’re working to get some of the other snowbirds to bring back a drug which one of the patients – a tow truck driver with lung cancer – needs, and which costs $60/dose here (he needs two a day). It costs $18/dose in Mexico.

Several of the people are in pretty bad shape, and everyone hovers around them, tending.

One women – swollen from steroids, I’d guess, dopy from painkillers and with some kind of neurological effect which makes it hard for her to move – came in. They’re Hispanic, and based on their clothes, not rich. Apparently their car broke down and another couple – just back from an around-the-world sailing trip – loaned them one. Kindness, care, and politeness mask the fear and concern.

The Hispanic woman’s husband dressed her for the cold this morning, tenderly pulling her coat on as she sat in her wheelchair, arranging her hat on her head, and then kissing her before he rolled her out.

I’ve seen this before, in parents of ‘special needs’ kids playing baseball.

It crushes me a bit that I don’t see it every day.

Jim Capozolla, of Rittenhouse Review, has laid down the gauntlet to Wonkette (the new Washington gossip/lifestyle blog from the vast Denton Empire) and her fans over a bit of snark she wrote; he says link to her and be forever banned from links from him.

That’s a simultaneously chickenshit and stupidly arrogant thing to do. I’ve certainly had my share of disagreements – some less than pleasant – with folks on the blogverse, and a notion like that would never occur to me.

I’m visiting family in NYC, and (did I mention that it’s cold?) since they are arch-liberal Democrats and have TV, we’re spending the night watching the post-election TV after going out to dinner (did I mention that it’s damn cold?).

I’m impressed that Dean could mount such a strong comeback…but then he gets up and makes his speech.
He harks back to the united country of the early 70’s, and the hope brought by affirmative action, and the civil rights struggle…which suggests that in his rarified circles of Park Avenue and Aspen that he went through a different 70’s than I did, in which those struggles led to deep divisions which are as yet unresolved.

It’s an interesting side note that he’s spending so much time and focus appealing directly to what I called ‘the fantasy ideology of the Democrats‘ – the last great pure victory, which was the Civil Rights movement.

Sadly, it is a fantasy ideology, and it’s certainly not a winning electoral strategy, particularly when tied to a tin tongue such as Dean displayed today. He defended quotas, and then shouted out to his peeps from San Francisco – I mean come on, guy, 75% of the country wants to saw San Francisco off and tow it out to sea. I mean c’mon, guy, weren’t there any volunteers from Nebraska or Ohio you could point out? And I’m the guy who keep defending redistribution, and has some affection for affirmative action, and I was wincing when he stood up and defended – to huge cheers – quotas, abortion rights, and rights for gays. To some extent, I believe in all those things. But I’m also aware that those are serious issues on which people who ought to support the Democratic economic and other policies choke.

Hey, Howard, remember your ‘Confederate Flag’ speech? Those guys just wrote you off. And, simply put, there aren’t enough folks like my aunt and uncle to replace them.

Kerry’s speech was decently Presidential, and while he seemed less awkward than Dean, there’s still something missing for me.

But I think he’s got the high ground, particularly given Edwards’ poor showing, and the fact (as noted by CNN) that Kerry won among both voters angry at Bush and those opposed to the war – which should have been Dean’s core constituents.

Bummer about Edwards, though. And is it cold, or what?

Calpundit has a great post up on the issues of income inequality and the root of his (and my) concern about it.

So even if you don’t think that economic equality is any concern of the government, you should still be concerned about our ever more squeezed middle class. They are the engine of economic growth, and if we continue to pursue policies that ignore them the entire economy will pay the price. We need to start paying attention before it’s too late.