I think the title says it all.

Middle Guy, TG and I saw it.

People laughed – at parts that weren’t supposed to be funny.

Lawrence Fishburne, who I respect beyond all belief, had that anxious Michael Caine “I’m just here getting a paycheck” look in his eyes for the whole film.

Believe me, any movie you imagined this to be is much, much better than this.

It’s almost as bad as ‘Signs.’

OK, I’m missing something here.

My party, the Democrats, just lost three statehouses in the last 60 days, and are on track to possibly lose another in a bit over a week.

The smart Democratic blogs … Kevin Drum, Matthew Yglesias, Daily KOS … not a peep about this or what, if anything it means.

My reaction is twofold:

First, I think that the Democrats may have suddenly taken a page from hapless L.A. Clippers owner Donald Sterling, who has believed for years that if he can only buy one great player, he can have a contending team.
Maybe it is all about “Beat Bush.” The problem is that you get there by growing and winnowing candidates at the lower levels…mayors, Congressmembers, Senators, Governors – and my sense is that the national Party isn’t doing a good job there. Look one level down from the current crop of Democratic contenders – ignoring how strong or weak you may believe them to be – and where are the contenders for the next cycle? I’m not an expert, but I don’t see a lot of interestng candidates until I get down to the mayoral level, and that’s bad. Politics is a team sport, and you have to play more than one position.

For the Democrats (who admittedly won some statehouses last time around, while losing the Senate and House), I wonder if it’s entirely too concentrated at the top.

Second, I’m inclined to ask “What has to happen, exactly, in order for us to panic?” In the polls, each of the plausible Democratic candidates is running behind the numbers of plain old “don’t like Bush”. We lost the Senate and House. We lost California, because the party wouldn’t stand up to a corrupt and barely competent incumbent and challenge him, either in the election or in the recall. A strong Democrat – a Feinstein, Panetta, or even an Angiledes – would be Governor now. We lost Kentucky and Mississippi, and the Republicans in Louisiana have to be smelling blood this morning.

And no one on the left is willing to sit down and go “Huh. Wonder what we’re doing wrong.”

Can I make some suggestions?

Well, my part of the presentation got done this morning at 3:00, and I’m up and don’t have much to do until this afternoon, so a bit of blogging and then back to reading documents.

Kevin Drum and I have agreed to do a cross-blog discussion, which I hope will widen, starting on the policy positions I took in my piece chastening the Democrats. We’ll work out some structure for it over the next day or so and maybe start it next week (if that works for him).

Tristero and I have also been having a damn civil email dialog, and have cooked up something which I then proposed to Kevin, and which he reasonably shot down as impossibly burdensome. But…I’m thinking we might try to make it into a collective project, and so a feasible one. And if nothing else if it fails, it will fail spectacularly.

Here’s what I’m thinking about as a start.

An encyclopedia of information on the policies of each of the major candidates in a specific set of areas. Pulling together position papers, speeches, news clips, etc., in one place so that people can step up to meet Tristero’s Challenge and actually read primary sources.

Now, I’ll point out that position papers do not policy make, and policy does not action determine. But it’s a start…

What I’d like to do is invite partisan supporters of each candidate to email me, and we’ll pick one person who will in essence be a ‘librarian’ for each of the major candidates (Clark, Dean, Gephart, Kerry, and Bush) who will receive information from reader or other sources, and then will forward links to Joe & me. We’ll then create an updated-weekly post around several areas that we think are interesting so that readers can link directly to all the current position papers and speeches of each candidate around a topic.

Call it ‘open source’ journalism.

Let’s start with the basic question: Stupid or Useful? Answer below in the comments.

Over the last day, I distinctly recall that I left three comments over at Matthew Yglesias’ in the thread responding to my post here.

Don’t see them this morning.

I’ve emailed Matthew, asking what’s up.

[Update: And he graciously replies that “he certainly did not” and assumes he has a technical glitch, which I’d encourage him to investigate – I find the back-and-forth in comments to be the best part of blogging.

And commented ‘bendover’ (is that in Maine?) adds that I have three comments in a differnt post of Matthew’s than I recalled. Which means either a) I’m not getting enough sleep, of b) that Matthew’s technical glitch moved the posts, which is unlikely. I’ll pick “a)” and offer an immediate apology to Matthew.

OK, that’s it. No more blogging until I get my presentations done and get some sleep. See everyone Thursday.]

Matt Yglesias has a cute post up on my discussions with Kevin Drum.

Now, Kevin and I have met, and while I think a Venn diagram of our views would overlap by about 85%, we do have some significant differences – we’ve just agreed to have a cross-blog discussion and try to identify and clarify them – but I have found that wherever he & I disagree, our discussions typically come from a point of mutual respect and a genuine belief that each of us means what we say, that we’re entitled to have an opinion, and that our arguments aren’t somehow codes for something else.

That’s not true of everyone participating in these discussions, sadly.
At a dinner at Kevin’s, I met some other bloggers – other than Tom of TBogg, I haven’t retained names – and we had a telling exchange.

Kevin asked me a direct question: “So is it that you buy into the ‘restructuring the Arab world’ justification for the war?” As I started to answer, one of the other bloggers, his voice honeyed with superior knowledge, added “Why in the world did you let yourself get spun so badly by the White House?“

My reply was Mad Dog Stare #2 (a personal favorite) and a simple statement: “Thank you so much for granting me the courtesy of assuming that I may have examined the information and made up my own mind.” He and I didn’t have much to say to each other for the rest of the evening.

Matt (whose post on Michael Totten’s ‘schtick’ lit me up like a Christmas tree – Matthew is, after all, the one who parlayed his blog into a cush media job, which in his own terms means that it’s his blogging that qualifies as ‘schtick’) posts the following. I’ll intersperse my comments.

Kevin Drum’s got himself embroiled in a quagmire-like debate with hawkish liberals or ex-liberal hawks or whatever you want to call them. In response, some things to consider doing before you defect from the Democratic Party:

Well, first of all, I don’t have any plans to defect from the Democratic Party. I may or may not vote the party line; personally, I’ll take each campaign as I see them. But I’ve been critical of the Democratic Party because I think it’s headed off a cliff into electoral oblivion, and I intend to publicly kick it’s ass as hard as I can to do what I can to get it steered in a more successful and productive direction.

Take a deep breath. Look in the mirror. Take another deep breath. Look at some photos of your liberal friends and family. Ask yourself: Do you really believe that they opposed the Iraq War because they wanted Saddam Hussein to stay in power; do you really think they don’t care if your hometown gets destroyed by terrorists?

No, I think they opposed the war because they believe they can have the benefits of modern liberal society without getting their hands dirty. They value moral purity and self-satisfaction above everything else – with the possible exception of creature comfort.

Try reading some actual policy statements put out by Democratic foreign-policy hands, members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and members of the Armed Services Committee. Ask yourself: Do the views expressed therein really sound like the characterizations of them you’ve read on NRO and the hawk blogs?

Actually, I do read the policy statements and talk to people who work within the political and defense establishment. I don’t base my opinions on Instapundit, NRO and Fox News And, believe it or not, I’m actually unhappy with much of what I hear. I’m trying to engage in a broader dialog about what makes me unhappy, in the hopes that I and others like me can have some impact on what the Democratic Party thinks and does.

Look again in the mirror, focusing this time on your hairline and that little space next to your eyes that gets wrinkly when you squint. There’s no easy way to say this, but . . . you’re getting old. I am too. It’s scary, it happens to us all. Ask yourself: Has the left really changed, or am I just that cliched guy who stopped really caring about the poor as I aged?

Tell you what, Matt – you look in the mirror and ask yourself if you’re just another jejune 20-something year old who thinks he knows everything; it’s a painfully familiar condition to me – I used to be one too. Back when I worked in politics and wrote laws and policy. But philosophically, I was uncomfortable with the idea that I could be a part of the political class, and make a damn comfortable upper-middle class living as a policy wonk, staff to an elected, or commentator – all without ever getting my hands dirty in the real world.

I was uncomfortable with the love of power that I saw in my peers, and the lack of wisdom, humility, and openness to have one’s views changed through experience. Sound familiar? It’s OK, you’re smart, and if you’re lucky, you’ll grow out of it.

Take a look at the transcript of the latest White House press conference. Find some other examples where the president had to respond on-the-fly to questions. Ask yourself: Given the perilous international situation, am I really comfortable with the fact that a total moron is president of the United States.

Gosh, Matt, I just love the schoolyard names. Here’s a clue: Bush isn’t a moron. I doubt that he’s even particularly stupid; I’ve met and had business with a fair number of elected officials, and the stupidest one I know (Barbara Boxer – most of the ones I’ve met are Democrats, so there may be a Republican who’se worse) is probably as smart as any of the bloggers I have met to date. One doesn’t get to high elected office in this land by being stupid, stories of Chauncey Gardner aside.

I’ll also add one of the hard truths that came to me several years out of grad school – life isn’t like school, and being smart and clever alone are not decent predictors of future success.

And having been elected, these officials – even Boxer, or my own detested Jackie Goldberg – are worthy of some basic measure of respect by all of us. I may loudly and publicly disagree with Jackie’s policies and politics, I may think that she’s deeply wrong and happily look forward to the end of her term, but I would never suggest that she’s an idiot or a moron, or that the public that elected her are idiots for electing her.

Read this post again. Consider the condescending tone, the cheap psychoanalysis, the refusal to confront your actual arguments. Ask yourself: Isn’t this exactly what I’ve been doing all this time? Just an exercise.

Matt, here’s a proposal. Go through all my stuff on Armed Liberal and Winds of Change. Find me five posts with condescending tone. Find five posts where I psychoanalyze you or any of the liberal Democrats (or even wacky leftists) with whom I disagree. Email me the cites. If we disagree, I’ll let Kevin or Brian Linse act as a referee. Find five, I’ll send you a nice crisp $100.00 bill. I’ll bet I can easily find ten quotes like that from you. I’ll even give you 2-1 odds; I’ll only ask for $50.00 if I do. Are you in?

I’m out here looking for arguments, and I have the habit of allowing that people who say things mean what they say. Perhaps it would be a good thing if you did too.

Here’s a little quote to put all this in a larger perspective. John Schaar was a political theorist, and a staunch member of the New Left – and one of my professors as an undergrad. This is from his essay on ‘The Case for Patriotism’:

“Finally, if political education is to effective it must grow from a spirit of humility on the part of the teachers, and they must overcome the tendencies toward self-righteousness and self-pity which set the tone of youth and student politics in the 1960’s. The teachers must acknowledge common origins and common burdens with the taught, stressing connection and membership, rather than distance and superiority. Only from these roots can trust and hopeful common action grow.”

…it’s something that Matthew hasn’t learned yet, which is a personal problem for him. But it’s something the left in this country hasn’t learned yet, which is a political problem for me and the rest of us.
–

Calpundit challenges Roger Simon for saying:

…here’s why I think they’re dangerous—they’re acting like we’re still in Vietnam when we’re in a real war of civilizations.

and says in reply:

Look, guys: if you think we ought to use military force to fight terrorism, I’m with you. But if you think we ought to use that same military force as part of a war of civilizations, count me out. Way, way out. That’s not any kind of liberalism I’m familiar with.

First, Kevin (and Matt) it’s not a schtick, it’s a movement. And the fact that the Democratic leadership, like you, doesn’t see that is why I won’t be booking big bets against Bush in 04.

That’s not the only place where Kevin and I part company.

I don’t think we are in a war of civilizations…yet. I don’t doubt that the other side thinks and hopes that we are, and that our response to them, over the last few decades, has been mistaken on a number of fronts.

A real war of civilizations, as I have pointed out over and over again, only has one result. We’ll be here, they won’t.

I believe there is still time to avert that war, through a balance of force, diplomacy, self-sacrifice in a number of arenas, and careful consideration of our relationships with the Islamic and Arab world.I’m not thrilled with a lot of what GWB has done on the front of diplomacy, self-sacrifice, and careful consideration. I think he has done the right thing in making it clear that we are serious and that we are willing to use force; up until now our response to the threats and acts of the Islamists was best summed up as “Isn’t that cute!!”

No more.

Sadly, I don’t yet see a better plan from the Democrats – one that would lead me to choose one of them over GWB. I’m not endorsing Bush (that would be hard for me to do) – but I’m certainly going to push the Dems to come up with something better.

Here’s a couple of off-the-cuff suggestions:

First, we’re not going anywhere in Afghanistan or Iraq until we’re done. Afghanistan will not turn into Vermont any time soon, but we will make sure that the power of the warlords is checked, and that it doesn’t collapse again. Iraq could be the leader of the Middle east, and we intend to help build it into that;

Second, we’re too dependent on ME oil. We’re going to do something about it, both by pushing conservation, expanding alternative energy, and expanding exploration. We’re going to build the damn windmills off of Cape Cod;

Third, we’re going to stop Israel from building new settlements and push them to dismantle existing illegal ones;

Fourth, we’re going to work to expand the ground-fighting capabilities of our military by adding at least one division to the Army, and looking carefully at the allocation of all our assets to make sure that we have the resources to deal with the kind of wars that we are going to realistically face;

Fifth, we’re going to sit with the Arab countries we are supporting and make it clear that they cannot buy internal stability by fomenting hate against Jews and the West and still expect our financial and military support. We will also talk about what kinds of support would be forthcoming if they did stop;

Sixth, we’re going to develop security mechanisms based on the theory that fine-grained systems that bring information and communications to the existing public safety community, as well as the public at large are better than huge, centralized bureaucratic solutions;

That’d be a start…

UPDATE:

* Roger L. Simon responds to Calpundit’s challenge as well.

* Matthew Yglesias joins a respectful cross-blog debate in a way that’s less than respectful. He gets this return volley, plus a proposed bet. Wonder if he’ll take it?

Calpundit links over to Atrios – who has received a lawyer-letter from an attorney representing Donald Luskin. The claim is that by claiming that Luskin ‘stalked’ Krugman, and by allowing commenters who then spun off of that theme, that Mr. Luskin was libeled.

God knows, I’m not a fan of Atrios, who I think is part of the Jackie Goldberg/ suicidal-lemming wing of the Democratic Party.

But this is just embarrassing.
Luskin – who, as far as I know, is a grown-up, writes with pretty sharp elbows himself:

Paul Krugman began his Tuesday column for the New York Times – inevitably, about the blackout – with one of the few truthful statements I can ever recall him uttering: “We still don’t know what started the chain reaction on Thursday.”

And it seems like pots should be careful about calling kettles black, no matter that the pot has been careful to tread – barely – on the side of the line which divides actionable from exceptionable behavior.

And pundits who use slings ought to be able to take a stone or two, and the fact that Mr Luskin can’t – the fact assuming that the letter Atrios posted was genuine (and the lawyer’s name does check out on the firm website) – certainly drops him a few kilometers below credible in my view.

Free speech – even hurtful speech – is something the folks at NRO (and others) have championed for some time. It appears that they neglected to mention that it only matters when someone else’s ox is being gored.

Personally, I’m hoping it’s some kind of prank. In that case, I’ll personally email Mr. Luskin an apology. Watching and waiting…

Joe talks about nuclear proliferation in the context of mathematical progression below, and expresses his anxiety that we aren’t solving the problem fast enough. I want to suggest something slightly different, and that is the notion of a ‘threshold’. Sadly, it will make him even more anxious – but hey, why should I be here by myself?

I took his post to suggest that the odds of a Nuclear Bad Thing happening increase in parallel with the dispersion of nuclear capability. Actually, it’s worse than that. There’s a threshold – probably a low one – past which it really doesn’t matter much.

I’ll use the example of drinking water.

Water that is 10^-6 parts sewage is drinking water. Water that is 10 ^-5 parts sewage is sewage (note that these are rhetorical rather than exact concentrations, etc.).
It doesn’t matter once the concentration goes up past some threshold level level.

Similarly, as we look at gun ownership in the U.S., one of my arguments with the supporters of strict limitations on gun ownership is that once we have, say, five or six million guns in the U.S., it doesn’t matter how many more we have (we currently have something like 300 million), we won’t see a meaningful change in the violence people commit with guns.

Similarly, once the possession of nuclear technology went past the core five countries, it doesn’t much matter how many more have it, it is going to be essentially impossible to control with the level of absolute certainty that is required.

So we have to find ways to adapt.

First, we have to adapt strategically.

One of the key things that frightens me is that the keystone to preserving a virtually fallout-free 20th Century – Mutually Assured Destruction – doesn’t map well to people who believe that blowing themselves up in a paroxysm of fury and hate is actually a good thing to do.

Next, we have to adapt tactically.

We have to harden our cities, and we have to start now. The good news is that it already looks as though we already have.

And, to some extent, we need to harden our hearts.

Joe and others have posted frequently about the madness that is at the heart of the Islamist movement. It is madness that must be turned and blunted – or must be stopped. I’m not yet at the point of arguing that we must stop it. I believe it can be turned, and that other voices can be found. But we must move to weaken the forces of hate and strengthen the forces that oppose them – all over the world.

That’s a burden, and we have to carry it – alone if needful, although I think that it doesn’t have to be.

Because the alternative will be even worse.

Somehow this has been briefly commented on, but not given a lot of play in the blogs I’ve seen. This story about the suicide bomber who was foiled yesterday is on page A6 of this morning’s L.A. Times (requires registration, use ‘laexaminer’/’laexaminer’) – which itself is positive news. And if true, suggests that the war in Iraq is in fact a lot more complex than those who suggest that it is the “natural resistance” of the Iraqi population to foreign invaders. Here’s the story:

The suicide bomber had packed his 1982 Toyota Land Cruiser well in preparation for his journey Monday to martyrdom. He had taken out the back seat and piled explosives and rockets from floor to roof. He lined the door panels with dynamite.

Police would later say his lethal load weighed more than 2 tons – enough to blow up the police station, the primary school next door, the crowded outdoor market on the corner and most of the neighborhood as well.

Sounds pretty serious. Now for the money quote.

The driver of the white Land Cruiser was Syrian, Iraqi authorities later said, and at 10:15 a.m. he drove slowly through the police station’s back gate. There he was blocked by a barricade of sand-filled barrels and a $120-a-month policeman who ordered him to retreat.

Now, I’m sure that $120 a month is an OK salary in Iraq right now, but what matters here is that the Iraqi police officer did what he was supposed to do. He was attentive, and he reacted – he defended himself and his police station against an attack by a foreigner – not an American military attack, but a terrorist attack by a foreign Arab.

The vehicle hit the outer wall of the police station with a grinding thud. Then there was the briefest moment of silence. No explosion. No gallant martyrdom. The Syrian jumped from the vehicle and hurled a grenade at Arshad as a bullet tore into the would-be bomber’s stomach.

Before he passed out, he managed to shout: “Arabs are cowards! Iraqis are traitors! I am an Arab, you cowards! Allahu akbar [God is great]!”

Police officers said they found a Syrian passport in the pocket of his blue, robe-like dishdasha. On the passenger’s seat was a police shirt and police armband that might have enabled him to pass through checkpoints.

I don’t know. If Syrian Islamists are the drivers in this round of suicide attacks, and if Iraqis are starting to successfully defend against them, I’ll take that as a) some measure of proof that the ‘flypaper’ theory might not be completely specious, and b) as proof that something significantly good is happening over there.

I’ve said in the past that the two keys to winning this war are an iron butt – the simple willingness to sit it out – and the adaptability to learn from our mistakes and the opponent’s tactics. We may be showing both.

I’ll add Instapundit’s great comment here, and second it:

Because if the White House — by which, in this case, I mean George W. Bush — decides to drop the ball on this, I’ll probably vote Democratic, even if Kucinich is the nominee. A half-hearted war is the very, very worst kind. I think that Bush understands that. He’d better.

I get up early, and the windows in our dining room face almost due East, and this morning the sun rose slowly, shrouded in haze, and an angry red. Our neighborhood cars are covered in fine white ash, and while the smell of smoke isn’t as strong as it was yesterday afternoon, it’s still strong.

I live nowhere near the fires; the closest one is probably 60 miles upwind from me, across the entire urbanized Los Angeles basin.

But it’s a reminder that Los Angeles, like almost all cities, is a made place (Doty in his great poem “Two Cities” talks about the “made world’s angled assault on heaven“), dependent on managing Nature as best we can to allow us to live here.
John McPhee talks a bit about it in his book ‘The Control of Nature’. The lengths we have to go to preserve our habitable bubble – the web of infrastructure that keeps the harsher forces of nature away from my house – against storm, fire, and the assaults of nature which would manifest entropy by wiping our homes down to sand and rubble.

Now, particularly in Los Angeles, we have a problem in that we do three things:

# We build outward along the city margin, which means we are in increasingly inhospitable terrain (the hospitable terrain having been developed decades ago). We do this for two reasons; because people seem to want semi-rural homes, and because they don’t want denser cities. They want the experience of looking out their yard at a wild canyon, covered with chaparral, and seeing a coyote or a bobcat. They just get upset when the canyon burns, taking their home with it, or the coyote views Fluffy the cat as an appetizer. They don’t want to increase the density within cities, because the congestion will be worse and the character – the suburban, detached home nature of much of Los Angeles, changes to an urban one as the density passes certain thresholds. And part of why they came to Los Angeles was to get away from an urban environment.

# We don’t spend money on the infrastructure that would make building out into the margins safer. Here we have an unholy alliance between the Left – the environmentalists who want to minimize the footprint of humankind on the wild places as we build them out, and the Right – who don’t want to burden developers with expensive improvements.

# We have starved the core public services – fire, police, emergency medical response – to feed the other, more politically rewarding parts of local government. And we’ve especially starved the preventative public services – like the folks who monitor brush clearance, or the public health and mosquito abatement folks – because they’re unglamorous and don’t ‘show well’ at budget time.

And so we burn.

If I had to characterize myself right now, I’d say I’m a ‘Pat Brown’ liberal. This state has twice as many people as it was designed to hold – as the man-made infrastructure that supports our habitable bubbles was designed for – and that can’t last.

While his era was one of pouring massive concrete infrastructure from one end of the state to the other, this era will be about sensors, electronic control systems, and small-grain solutions to the problems that could be solved in the 60’s by the liberal application of concrete.

But if we don’t invest in our infrastructure – if we don’t act to protect the bubble that we all live within – we’d better get used to camping in stadiums.