Olio

• I set up to tape Matthews, but MSNBC screwed with the schedule (Serpentine!), and I wound up taping Olbermann. So I've heard he's playing the Bradley Effect card, but I didn't catch him at it. I did switch on at some point--an unscheduled re-run--and heard him clutch when asked about the slow call for Hillary, which suggests there definitely was something fishy about that, same as it smelled.

• Olbermann, on the other hand, seemed chastened. He was definitely subdued, and when he repeated the particulars of his Monday night assault on Hillary he fired ping-pong balls instead of grapeshot. It's not enough, Keith. The press performance over last weekend was abominable. The question isn't Why the Polls Were Wrong. It's why everyone used the polls to stomp Senator Clinton, and we already know the answer. And it's not as if anyone who's been paying attention should have been caught unaware, but you lent your own voice to it. You've railed at FAUX while ignoring Imus, Scarborough, and Rita Cosby, not to mention cooperating with Matthews and Russert, who are a bigger part of the decade-long disaster than O'Reilly, Gibson, and Hannity combined. You are now the network star, and it's time you either demanded some integrity for your own show or checked ESPN for renewed interest. I suppose Timmy the Wonder Pig is inevitable; like a slacker fast-food employee NBC must make up for his lack of productiveness by making him work several extra shifts. That's a different matter from letting him come on your show to pretend he wasn't involved with Scooter Libby. Chris Matthews--it doesn't matter whether he's viewed by 20 people or 20,000--is a vain, vapid little slimeball whose program is a nightly billboard for what's wrong with political coverage. Call him out, this time  before he exits, unlike Imus.  Get him off the dais; put him at the kids' table.  The lying is the problem, Keith. The lying, not the odds, is why everybody's been so wrong so inevitably. It's simply not possible to have learned nothing from the Bush administration.  

• And add to that Andrea Mitchell. Just hit Delete. In the generalized merriment yesterday I sorta failed to notice that that "Every candidate is going to spin this as a Win" routine was specifically crafted to go after Hillary and was written ahead of time, when it looked like she'd lose, out of fear she might not lose by enough (not to mention it's a fucking commonplace which would then have been held up as an example of Insider Prescience).  As I said yesterday, it's enough to note that "reporters" had been spinning twenty times harder than they were ever going to let any candidate do--and, of course, any claim Hillary made about "doing better than expected" or "winning an equal number of delegates" would have been greeted with more sneering and snorting and  somebody's observation of how calculated she seemed. Unless she happened to be doing anything with her face other than the Pageant Smile, in which case they would have talked about her weeping into her cleavage. At any rate, Mitchell is a nasty little attack poodle, and it's time to break out the needle.

• The goddam internets exist. It is no long sufficient to be halfway informed about what was in the Times this morning. In fact that's how to be semi-misinformed, a point which cannot possibly be lost on the rest of the Press gang. Chris Matthews had never heard of TPM. It's like a clerk at Best Buys who's never heard of mp3s. The man is paid a king's ransom to blather about politics. TPM is a Beltway-insider bloglomerate, not some crackpot Hoosier with a free site and a propensity for the word "motherfucker".

• Gail Collins, associate tree-killer, Times Crime Family: "Clinton actually seems most genuine when she’s being dull. She’s gone back to talking about policy with voters. That’s just the way she saved her first Senate campaign by disappearing into the depths of upstate New York for an endless listening tour that drove reporters mad with tedium but seemed to make the citizens very happy."

Although I must say that, in contrast to MoDo yesterday, this time we get our confirmation of the political Press' utter contempt for its readership, and its secret desire to cover the Hollywood scandal beat, from someone who is not actively hallucinating as she types. But once again:  it is simply not possible that they don't get it.  Yet they do it anyway.  Just as every cop is a criminal.

• Melissa McEwan at Shakesville points out that Obama has a little more 'splain' to do. Which points out a related matter in all this: the man has been getting a Pass MoDo would have been embarrassed to throw at him, if she were capable of embarrassment.

He's good, y'know, really good. But he's been encouraged to do precisely the wrong things at the wrong time: attack (Hiya, Mo!) when he should have remained patient, believe his own press, and, above all, let on he'll use a rapier to clear a forest. And for good or ill, or both, this is what campaigns are mostly about:  timing.  If he intends to be taken seriously for that transcending petty politics stuff  he needs to come out an denounce the nastiness going on around him, especially coming from his own campaign, and then stop trying to be subtle when he dishes any out.  This was always the inherent problem with the Bus to Cloudland routine.   There were a lot of people yesterday bemoaning the fact that their dreams of the campaign being over had been dashed. Those were nightmares, kids. You need to learn to tell the difference, and your man needs considerably more seasoning. Sometime I'll list the attractive candidates I've fallen for since 1972. Meanwhile, here's a hint: George McGovern was the most successful of the lot.

• Goes double for John Edwards. The man is swimming through Jell-O; he's perpetually a lap down. He gangs up on Hillary, which was not only politically tone-deaf but also the single most divisive act of the Democratic campaign. Yes, it's an old saw, but nonetheless true: do not take advice from a demented political commentator who calls you The Breck Girl! Then he doubles-down in New Hampshire when he should have figured out that he was helping Obama, rather than himself, even if he couldn't figure out it was ethically wrong.

Edwards seems at some point, early in the campaign (meaning 2006, I think), to have imagined that he was the accomplished studio musician who was being shoved aside for the babelicious (my spell checker accepted that!) but off-key singer who was fucking the producer. But Obama has done far better with his gifts, and Edwards, the only real Change candidate (and don't make me say that again) among the Top Three has been hittin' clams every night. Yes, it's impossible in the modern campaign to avoid profession strategists, image consultants, and other such riff-raff; maybe the idea is to throw the I Ching every so often while you're at it.

• Final, gratuitous shots at Obamalotus Consumption. Gary Kamiya:

Obama's Iowa victory was one of those rare moments when an abstraction becomes real. In "Areopagitica," John Milton wrote, "Methinks I see in my mind a noble and puissant nation rousing herself like a strong man after sleep, and shaking her invincible locks." In Iowa, we witnessed the shaking of those locks. Like one of those miraculous reversals in one of Shakespeare's late plays, when a statue suddenly comes to life after standing motionless for years, Obama's victory seemed almost otherworldly -- as if the laws of space and time had been suspended, and a quality as evanescent and fragile as hope had suddenly become real. I am not a religious person, but it was hard not to feel that his triumph vindicated the essence of what I think of as the secular essence of religion, something even nonbelievers can believe in: the possibility of inner transformation. A transformation at once personal, and national.

Ezra Klein:

Obama's finest speeches do not excite. They do not inform. They don't even really inspire. They elevate. They enmesh you in a grander moment, as if history has stopped flowing passively by, and, just for an instant, contracted around you, made you aware of its presence, and your role in it. He is not the Word made flesh, but the triumph of word over flesh, over color, over despair. The other great leaders I've heard guide us towards a better politics, but Obama is, at his best, able to call us back to our highest selves, to the place where America exists as a glittering ideal, and where we, its honored inhabitants, seem capable of achieving it, and thus of sharing in its meaning and transcendence.

Fess up.  Are you guys actually paid Clinton agents?

• Finally, and we mean finally: Fred Thompson. A new generation has now learned that musk hangs around long, long after you wished you'd never bought it. Any fool could have seen that Run Fred Run (The Next Reagan!) was not the result of acute political analysis but the desperate gurgling of a constituency already defeated. That Thompson took it, and ran ambled with it, suggests that, despite all the talk, he may not actually have married his wife for her brains.

Get Me Rewrite!

MoDo, for once inadvertently revealing details about the inner lives of "cabbies" "her co-workers", rather than herself:

When I walked into the office Monday, people were clustering around a computer to watch what they thought they would never see: Hillary Clinton with the unmistakable look of tears in her eyes.

A woman gazing at the screen was grimacing, saying it was bad. Three guys watched it over and over, drawn to the “humanized” Hillary. One reporter who covers security issues cringed. “We are at war,” he said. “Is this how she’ll talk to Kim Jong-il?”

Another reporter joked: “That crying really seemed genuine. I’ll bet she spent hours thinking about it beforehand.” He added dryly: “Crying doesn’t usually work in campaigns. Only in relationships.”

How would you know?

My dad, 87 and going strong, grew up in an era where he never saw or heard an airplane unless he traveled to do so. My first record player, given me by my grandmother, played her Jolson 78s; by the time I was old enough to shop for myself they had been relegated to the area behind the counter, where they stood in brown paper sleeves, being ignored. Now there's 600 vinyl albums in my basement I'm too lazy to transfer to mp3s, and my dad flies to Vegas whenever he feels the urge, without having to hand-crank the flivver to get to the airport. So why is Maureen Dowd still at the Times? There's plenty of room for incoherent crackpottery on the blogosphere, and there must be some equivalent of Behind the Counter and Out of the Way at the Times, at the very least.

And maybe they could devote her space to covering issues or imparting information or something. Just kidding. I'll bet K-Lo could handle the increased workload as well as Kristol does.

Ooopsie!

Campaign commentary? Sure, you want beige, cream, biscuit, pale, or sicklied o'er?

BROTHER, there ain't nothin' compares with the look of five or six pundits forced to bathe in their own excrement, not Duke losing in the semifinals, not the Yankees failing to make the playoffs. Nothin'. Tonight was the greatest political media spectacle since Judy Miller did the perp walk, and it was nearly as sweet as watching the This Week gang, and especially George Eff Will, trying to overcome thirty minutes of gag reflexes the week following their confident prediction that Bill Clinton would resign after the DNA ID, only to see his poll numbers skyrocket.

Of course the major difference between punditry and sports is that a massive humiliation in sports usually results in someone taking some sort of blame.

First off, let me say this: fuck Keith Olbermann, who opened his Monday night show with a ten-minute hit piece on Hillary Clinton that, had it come from Rush Limbaugh he would have skewered like a biopsied pilonidal cyst. He denounced her "Rovian" attack on fellow Democrats (namely, the guy whose coronation they'd been planning all weekend) when she dared to suggest she thought she was the best candidate to address a possible terror attack. And, of course, she cried.

Of course Olbermann's free to attack whomever he sees fit, and even be a dick about it, and we're free to remind everyone that this brave lecturer of the post-disaster George W. Bush was performing as a trained seal in the dark Spring of 2003, for the sake of taking over a cable news show. But please, can't we give Tom Brokaw something to do that involves fresh air and an undisclosed location? Brokaw always boxed three weight classifications lower than his competitors, and the fact that sitting him next to Brian Williams is the only way to give him any gravitas doesn't do either of them any good.

It was clear that the greatest portion of the shock! these people reported on all night was their own, especially in the way it took at least two hours for them to acknowledge that a) Senator Clinton had a lead that looked to be holding up and b) that by not getting blown out she had won big regardless. They kept holding onto the idea that it was "too close to call" while neglecting to add that that info was coming from their pollsters, and statewide exit polling, and not the stream of official results, and "to close to call" could be translated as "Obama loses". At some point Andrea Mitchell barged in--again, please, a one-way ticket for her and Alan? Somewhere, even if it's not prison?--to start speculating about how all the candidates would spin their results as a Win, thereby ignoring the fact that her own profession had been spinning longer and more furiously than any candidate would have dared.

Memo to Rachael Maddow: if--after all six courses of soufflé have been wiped off all the white European males at the big table--you decide to bring up how TPM was blaming Chris Matthews for stirring up a Hillary sympathy vote, either tell it straight or don't bring it up in the first place. No one used Matthews as "a metaphor" for anti-Hillary press coverage. Someone spoke explicitly of the sexist bullshit coming out of his mouth. Most of American can now connect to this internets thing and see for themselves, for one thing. For another, Matthews, and Olbermann, and Russert, and Williams are all guilty of being something a bit beyond metaphor bait.

Matthews, by the way, didn't even bother to deny he deserved to be treated as a metaphor for relentless anti-Clintonism; he just denied "having that sort of influence". Humility, thy name is Tweety.


And not on MSNBC (but I can't figure why), Sully brings up the Bradley Effect. The man who once said that by the time he'd reached political consciousness (in another country, mind you) civil rights was a dead issue and reverse discrimination was what animated him and his peers, now accuses (make that possibly accuses) New Hampshire Democrats of being closet racists, thus explaining why the Obama bandwagon he'd run to catch up with had a blow out. I think we can safely rule out New Hampshire voters getting their personal fill of Obamamania from reading your blog, Andy, but we can't really say the same for sure about those teevee guys and their sexist bullshit.

Now would be an excellent time for all the nets to step back, take a look at their coverage of the past week or two, and improve. And I mean that as a joke. Thing is, the punditocracy hasn't been wrong every single step of the campaign so far out of bad luck; they've been consistently wrong because, like the Bush administration, they're inveterate liars.

ADDENDUM: I realize it was a room full of campaign insiders, but the Obama pod people are starting to seriously creep me out. And when he said:

"We have been warned about offering false hope, but in America hope is never false," I was reminded of Mystery Men:

Mr. Furious: Okay. Am I the only one who finds these sayings just a bit formulaic? "If you wanna put something down, you gotta pick it up". "If you wanna go left, you gotta go right". It's...
Sphinx: Your temper is very quick, my friend. But until you learn to master your rage...
Mr. Furious: Your rage will become your master? That's what you were gonna say, right? Right?
Sphinx: Not necessarily.

Imagine

Disposable Wipes

Jack Shafer, "Who's afraid of Bill Kristol? The Huffington Post left, but not me." January 3

Bill Kristol, "President Mike Huckabee?" January 7

SHAFER:

If being wrong about the war should disqualify Kristol from the Times op-ed page, then Times op-ed veteran and war-supporter Thomas L. Friedman, who was still calling the invasion "one of the noblest things this country has ever attempted abroad" eight months after the fact, should resign his commission. Bill Keller, Times executive editor today but a columnist at the dawn of the war, should pack and leave, too, because he supported the war in February 2003 as a "reluctant hawk." To be completely consistent, let's have the Washington Post sack its editorial page for its Iraq errors and the majorities of both houses of Congress resign.

Good Lord, where do you have to stand to imagine this as some sort of threat? "Oh, please, sir," cries The Huffington Post Left, "do not deprive us of our thrice-weekly Friedman. Perhaps we were too hasty."

Oh, you say, Kristol's journalistic crime is not just that he was wrong about launching the war but that he has been absolutely wrong about every chapter in the war since the shock-and-awe bombs lit up Baghdad. Well, not wrong at every turn. From where I write this afternoon, he looks pretty goddamn prescient about the wisdom of mounting the "surge" and adopting a counterinsurgency strategy in Iraq.

Mr. Shafer, you are seated behind a post.  

Pundits are wrong sometimes and right others. Pundits shouldn't lose or win gigs on the basis of how many of their predictions come true but whether they write interesting copy. Kristol—love him or hate him—writes interesting copy.

First: professionally I'm indifferent to him. Personally, he's a scumbag for, among other things, insisting publicly that he was "too young to be drafted for Vietnam", the sort of detail a "pundit"--the word should frequently be enclosed in quotes, and Kristol is one reason why--should not "get wrong". And when he does it ought to be enough that the question of winning a gig isn't even asked. Otherwise, this country owes an apology to Larry Craig.

Kristol does not write "interesting copy"--not that acolytes of that Rand woman should ever be allowed to engage in literary criticism--and even if he did such is obviously neither required nor even glimpsed that often on the Times Op-Ed pages, unless by "interesting" you mean "offering a close-up view of individual pathologies at work in the national press".

KRISTOL:

After the last two elections, featuring the well-born George Bush and Al Gore and John Kerry, Americans — even Republicans! — are ready for a likable regular guy. Huckabee seems to be that.

What interesting copy!  

His campaigning in New Hampshire has been impressive. At a Friday night event at New England College in Henniker, he played bass with a local rock band, Mama Kicks. One secular New Hampshire Republican’s reaction: “Gee, he’s not some kind of crazy Christian. He’s an ordinary American.”

Now where to, Mac?

In general, here in New Hampshire he’s emphasized social issues far less than in Iowa (though he doesn’t waffle when asked about them). Instead he’s stressed conservative economic themes, seamlessly (if somewhat inconsistently) weaving together a pitch for limited government with a message that government needs to do more to address the concerns of the struggling middle class. This latter point seems to be resonating, as headlines in local papers announce an increase in the national unemployment rate amid speculation about a coming recession.

That Middle-Class misery our party has created over the last thirty years? Now would be a good time to cash in!

Some Democrats are licking their chops at the prospect of a Huckabee nomination. They shouldn’t be. For one thing, Michael Bloomberg would be tempted to run in the event of an Obama-Huckabee race — and he would most likely take votes primarily from Obama. But whatever Bloomberg does, the fact is that the Republican establishment spent 2007 underestimating Mike Huckabee. If Huckabee does win the nomination, it would be amusing if Democrats made the same mistake in 2008.

Yes, we might have a good chuckle with that with some of the middle class, provided we were forced to share an elevator with them at some point.

Take us home, Jack:

Calling Kristol's addition to the page redundant because David Brooks, a former Weekly Standard-bearer, already works there reveals a lack of familiarity with both men's writings. Brooks is "pro-choice and pro-gay marriage," as Ross Douthat noted three years ago in the National Review. Kristol is neither. Brooks is a journalist first and always has been. Kristol is a political operator. Brooks tries to persuade his readers of his views gently, as if he's a guest in the house. Kristol lives to brawl and make enemies. To him, writing is fighting.

Kristol's been sitting atop a wingnut sinecure masthead for fourteen years, after service as Dan Quayle's Brain (you'd think he'd tell the truth about Nam and lie about that one, wouldn't you?).  Who's he ever been close enough to to brawl with? An artillery barrage is not a "brawl". Neither is smearing shit on someone's windshield in the middle of the night.

Who's Afraid of Bill Kristol? Not me. I think it'll be fun watching him in an environment where he gets fact-checked for once.

(And if he's not David Brooks, why'd he just re-write Brooks' column from three days ago?)

Stop Me If You've Heard This One Before

Indianapolis Racist Star: "Mayoral Transition Anything But Smooth" January 6

TOO bad the online version doesn't preserve the Dead Tree Edition's subhead: "Peterson administration accused of leaving mess and destroying documents in its final days in office." Thank God it still preserves the Amazing Incontrovertible Proof from the original:

• "John Cochran, Ballard's transition director, said the Peterson team became less cooperative toward the end. As one example, he led a visiting reporter on a tour of a disheveled office supply room on the 25th floor that looked as if a sour grape had exploded inside it."

• "Several employees in the City-County Building said the shredding machine was going nonstop in the final week of Peterson's tenure, with the remains hauled directly to waiting city trash trucks."

• 'Greg Wilson, the city's new director of minority business affairs, was unhappy about the situation.

"The sad thing is that they were acting like those were their documents," Wilson said. "Those records are the citizens' documents. Tax money paid to produce them." '

No word yet on 1) why the disheveled office supply room could not be captured on film, though it's suspected the culprits may have employed a special Transylvanian sour grape variety Democrats brought in just for the purpose (little realizing the sort of vivid word pictures ace Racist Star reporters are capable of painting); 2) in this age of global terrorism why several employees would be running around the City-County Building without their IDs; 3) when the shredding machines will be removed from the 25th floor, since there can't be any legitimate need for them; or 4) how many weeks it'll be before Greg "The Accidental Mayor" Ballard announces we should all put this behind us and move forward.

And Another Thing: Who's Emailing This Crap? And To Whom?

David Brooks, "The Two Earthquakes." January 4

DAVID Brooks looks into his post-Iowa crystal ball and sees...a reflection of David Brooks. What a surprise.

I'm a slow learner, so here's my nugget of obliviousness for 2008: Politicians (viz. Mike Huckabee, Barack Obama) eventually have to turn their collection of platitudes into some sort of action; it's the punditocracy that gets to pander for votes twelve months of every twelvemonth with no regard for the payoff.

Barack Obama has won the Iowa caucuses. You’d have to have a heart of stone not to feel moved by this. An African-American man...

Hello, Dave? Is this David Brooks? Hey, hi, Dave, it's me, 1961. You remember, the year you were born? Look, I'm not surprised you don't recognize my voice, 'cause you never bother to look me up. Oh, sure, once a year I get some offhand Camelot reference, but...anyway, me an' some of the other Bygones were sitting around drinkin' coffee and kicking around your article--I mean that literally, Dave--and, well, y'know, I've got the Freedom Riders, and the Albany Project, and some of the other guys have bus boycotts and sit-ins and mass arrests, Marches on Washington and Voting Rights Acts and Edmund Pettis Bridges or assassinations, and we sorta agreed that for the last forty of us your party, Dave, has had next to no use for any of the African-Americans involved in those, yet here you are lecturing people on how they ought to have an emotional attachment to an African-American candidate for the other party's nomination!  And, well, it seemed a touch facile, you know? Jes' sayin'. Hey, nice talkin' to you, and maybe we'll see you at that virtual touch football game in Hyannisport this summer, huh? Bunghole.

wins a closely fought campaign in a pivotal state.

"Pivotal"? Th' fuck's pivotal about Iowa? The only time in a century seven votes would have decided a Presidential election Iowa went for Gore. The only postwar election where Iowa didn't vote for the actual winner (ahem, of the popular vote) was 1976. Iowa may be in play, but it's a trailing indicator at best.  No non-incumbent has won his party's caucus on gone on to be elected, and only one--George W. Bush--wound up in the White House anyway.  

He beats two strong opponents, including the mighty Clinton machine. He does it in a system that favors rural voters. He does it by getting young voters to come out to the caucuses.

1) It may be a happy day when young voters decide an election, or it may not, but by all means call me when it happens, because the next time will be the first; 2) "a system that favors rural voters" is a peculiar way to say "94% white", and he won among people who described themselves as "Democrats", not those who called themselves "clodhoppers"; and 3) we do not accept the idea that professional political wordsmiths use terms like "machine" accidentally, which means we smell the Klintoon Khronicles, v. 2008 at work. Fine. Just leave us remember who got depantsed in the Racist Reagan Sweepstakes. "Clinton Juggernaut" we accept. "Clinton Express", no problem. The suggestion of a political machine, coming from a Republican, is a mirth provoker. So's stealing your lunch money. For the time being, let's just admit there's a sizable anti-Clinton machine that's still fascinated with Bill's You Know, which apparently cannot be shamed into quitting.

And Americans are not going to want to see this stopped. When an African-American man is leading a juggernaut to the White House, do you want to be the one to stand up and say No?

Not if you're a Republican and you're saying it in print, anyway. Or if you're saying it out loud before sundown, you're alone, and your sheet's still at the dry cleaners.

I'd just like to note here that this notion of America as a place somewhere over the Hudson just waiting to clasp a black man to its Kumbaya-hummin' bosom comes from the same wing of the Republican party which was shocked a couple of years back to learn it had been sharing a platform with Christian extremists.  And it's not exactly as if you have to sully your beautiful mind at LGF to find racist attacks on Obama.  Rush Limbaugh gets invited to the White House, doesn't he?

Obama has achieved something remarkable. At first blush, his speeches are abstract, secular sermons of personal uplift — filled with disquisitions on the nature of hope and the contours of change.

Sorta like a David Brooks book, except for "abstract, secular sermons of personal uplift" you substitute "crabgrass".

Yet over the course of his speeches and over the course of this campaign, he has persuaded many Iowans that there is substance here as well.

Or, as someone who wasn't trying to spin the Iowa caucus results to reflect his opinion of all things Clinton might put it, he got several hundred Iowans to vote for him in a glorified straw poll.

Obama is changing the tone of American liberalism, and maybe American politics, too.

Okay, I've said it before, and I'll say it again: when you can't offer bullshit profundities on the Times Op-Ed page simply because you're one of its two designated Republican mouthpieces; when the public airwaves aren't dominated by liars, thieves, whores, and racists, and when being spectacularly wrong, or spectacularly dishonest, as a national pundit carries at least the same prospect of losing one's job as spitting in a hamburger while working at Burger King does, then we will have changed the tone of American politics.

Until then, Barack Obama is an accomplished guy with a line of patter that's won him some votes. He may be positioned to be the best Democratic candidate in terms of pulling the party together post-convention, but the idea that in the meantime he's subdued the party's activists and the general anger on the Left under the warm cloak of abstract secular sermons of personal uplift is a Republican fantasy, Dave, ol' lad.

On the Republican side, my message is: Be not afraid. Some people are going to tell you that Mike Huckabee’s victory last night in Iowa represents a triumph for the creationist crusaders. Wrong.

All righty, then.  Glad we got that cleared up before there was any ugliness on the campaign trail.

Huckabee won because he tapped into realities that other Republicans have been slow to recognize. First, evangelicals have changed. Huckabee is the first ironic evangelical on the national stage. He’s funny, campy (see his Chuck Norris fixation) and he’s not at war with modern culture.

Um, meaning what, exactly? That your multinationalist chums won't have any pornoesque money-making schemes unduly hindered by public morals crusades? I think you might imagine that Huckabee would be the most beholden to that crowd of any Republican President, past, present, or potential, which means a religious-nut AG and a Christo-nutty FCC, which are GOP guarantees anyway--don't kid yourself about Maverick John, boy-o--and a lot state legislatures emboldened to do the work too dirty for the national party.  And what else?  There won't be another Schiavo, or ten, just because the man has a sense of humor?

I'm not worried about him--in fact I'd love to see him nominated--but you phony libertarians ought to be. "Evangelicals have changed" is the latest line from people who read the Times Sunday Magazine, not from people who actually know evangelicals. '08 was the shot they were waiting for, but they blew it by believing Bush's win in '04 was all about them. Suddenly they're revived.  If they gain the White House again, through Huckabee or Thompson or, yes, Romney, they'll be looking for a big payoff. McCain won't be much better. But Huckabee would definitely be the worst.

...real middle-class families have more to fear economically from divorce than from a free trade pact. A person’s lifetime prospects will be threatened more by single parenting than by outsourcing. Huckabee understands that economic well-being is fused with social and moral well-being, and he talks about the inter-relationship in a way no other candidate has.

Ignoring the cringe quotient of "single parenting" for a moment--what happened to that Mike Huckabee guy who was here a paragraph ago? You know, the evangelical Christian? He's suddenly morphed into David Brooks giving his idea of a spiffy luncheon speech for Ecumenicalism Week. So you can construct an economic-esque argument against what evangelicals generally describe, rather more plainly, as Sin (while avoiding any mention of the behaviors they tend to focus public opprobrium on, like homosexuality, in favor of that amorphous single parentin', which, like divorce, evangelicals probably do more of than the general population). Big deal. It doesn't mean the matter's going to stop at President Huckabee lecturing poor women about keeping their legs crossed.

In that sense, Huckabee’s victory is not a step into the past. It opens up the way for a new coalition.

A conservatism that recognizes stable families as the foundation of economic growth is not hard to imagine. A conservatism that loves capitalism but distrusts capitalists is not hard to imagine either. Adam Smith felt this way. A conservatism that pays attention to people making less than $50,000 a year is the only conservatism worth defending.

Hey, give me ten minutes. I'd like to list every defense of that conservatism found in the columns of David Brooks before it became politically expedient.

Will Huckabee move on and lead this new conservatism? Highly doubtful. The past few weeks have exposed his serious flaws as a presidential candidate. His foreign policy knowledge is minimal. His lapses into amateurishness simply won’t fly in a national campaign.

And give me another five; I'd list to recount every instance of David Brooks saying this about George W. Bush, misunderestimated candidate.

So the race will move on to New Hampshire. Mitt Romney is now grievously wounded. Romney represents what’s left of Republicanism 1.0. Huckabee and McCain represent half-formed iterations of Republicanism 2.0. My guess is Republicans will now swing behind McCain in order to stop Mike.

How convenient for you. Republicans will now rally around the candidate who most resembles David Brooks, in order to stop the one whom he most fears but can't say so, whose constituency, the Changed Evangelicals, will then silently go right along with this in order to help create Republicanism 2.0, belatedly justify a foolish support for an idiotic war, and be content with a nice, half-assed, conveniently doomed School Prayer Amendment or two. Looks like another bright shiny year for you guys.

And here's the thing I'd like to know, though I realize it's a busy season for pundifyin': supposing either man does get elected President.  What steps are the other's supporters planning to take toward ending partisanship then, huh?

Go Ioway

WELL, fuck. Shredded lateral collateral, some menisci (I looked up the plural) damage, arthritis and a migrant kneecap. Surgery scheduled for a couple weeks, subject to my Poor Wife being available to chauffeur my anesthetized carcass around. Surgery's how I figured it would turn out, but I was hoping to get a fighting chance at natural healing first. I blame the manufacturer, with apologies to Lenny Bruce.

And I blame the doctor, who pulled the But I'm Still A Virgin act on me when I asked for a new Vicodin script. "We don't like to do that," he says, like I enjoy waking my wife in the middle of the night yelping in pain, secure in the knowledge that at least I wasn't being overprescribed. I thought we'd gotten over that Nancy Reagan One Toke And The Next Thing You Know You'll Be Selling Your Wife Into Chinese Slavery routine in the health game. It's fucking Vicodin, Doc, not crack. We used to call them "aspirin". Look at me. I'm fifty-four. That means I was a teenager in the late 60s/early 70s, which means if Life Experience counted in such things I could be an anesthesiologist.

I suppose I should be glad I didn't get a Zipper Knee back when. But on the other hand, if this would have just held off another couple years the Glorious Everlasting Light of His Obamaness would have delivered us one of those all-purpose Space Surgery widgets Bones McCoy uses and I'd be boogalooin' down Broadway.

Okay, look, I don't mean to pick on the man; it's mostly his followers and advisers I have a problem with, especially Afternoon Blabfest hosts who've made billions proving you can't underestimate how much the American public overestimates its own intelligence, and, concurrently, that you're never too old to pay through the nose for a virtual My Little Pony™. The woman is the same age as I--we were born one month apart--and here's the second paragraph of her website's paean:

Newsweek magazine calls Senator Obama "a political phenomenon unlike any previously seen on the American scene." Since being elected, Senator Obama has been on the cover of Vogue magazine and won a Grammy® for best spoken word album. He even has a beer named after him!

I'm guessing that everyone of a certain age is now thinking exactly what I thought, namely how much better off this country would be if these people had been around to assist the Stevenson campaign. Exclamation point.

So now that literally dozens of Iowans have spoken in their unique, if not hyperreal, 19th century version of the Pepsi Challenge, maybe Senator Obama will be pressed into running for President, instead of Candidate You'd Most Like To Name A Beer After!, but I suppose we'll have to wait to see what MoDo wants him to do next.

You'd think that having given birth to Jimmy Carter, History's Greatest Monster, in 1976, Iowans would still be ducking for cover. At least the rest of us can forget about them for another four years, assuming we're not involved in college wrestling or the professional corn de-tasseling circuit.

In fact, if Barack Obama is so all-fired set on dishing out hope for the future and curing rampant disillusionment (which reminds me, how come people try to make a big deal out of John Edwards, wealthy and coiferiffic attorney-at-law, "hypocritically" presenting himself as a spokesman for the downtrodden, but when some GQ-handsome Harvard Law grad with $10 million of other people's money available just to get his face plastered all over a state with seven electoral votes starts talking about Disillusionment no one says, "Th' fuck you know about it?") eliminating the Iowa Caucasian Caucuses might be a good place to start. I listened to Keith Olbermann do five minutes at the top of his show last night about how overblown Iowa was, before introducing the horserace graphics and bringing on...Tim Fucking Russert, who proceeded to agree that Iowa was overblown while explaining the "psychological importance" of a victory. Which made me think:

Do something about that, Senator!

It's all well and good to bemoan Washington gridlock, but if we're not in agreement that it's a lot easier to moan than to do something about it then some of us have the opportunity to learn an important lesson. The Iowa moderates who voted in Democratic caucuses Tuesday so they could express their displeasure about partisan politics in Washington aren't its innocent victims: they're the very people whose silence facilitated an imperial and imperious White House trashing their birthright and their treasury. So now they're suddenly part of the solution? Fine, but it'd be reassuring to know they now understood the problem, something the junior Senator from Illinois could explain to them. He saw through the war from the beginning, after all; meanwhile, every Iowan in Congress voted for it, and they all were reelected after. Consensus ain't always all it's cracked up to be. There was no public voice raised against attacking Afghanistan (including Obama's), and little regarding Iraq beyond the caricatured Quagmirist. Look where that consensus got us. We could all agree with Tim Russert, or David Brooks, assuming we think the cesspit of American post-war interventionism and its war on economic justice would look nicer in a uniform beige. Otherwise, we need partisanship, and we'd best be ready for it to continue. The fight's over the bullshit American Exceptionalism our children and grandchildren will be paying for without ever being given a voice, Senator. It's not about Flag Burning Amendments, or only peripherally.

As for his dewy-eared idealist volunteers, more power to 'em, but one is forced to reiterate that just as someone with no expertise may not be the best choice to disarm a bomb, a group of people who've come of age without having to fight for civil or voting rights, or reproductive or gender rights, or even the right to party, may not fully appreciate where they'd be without partisanship, let alone how much more than rhetoric is required to fight it.

New 'Puter

A new (actually factory-refurbished) aluminum iMac with a screen bigger than any television I owned before age 30, and which, since Fed-Ex didn't get around to delivering until 7 PM I'll be playing with for the next couple hours before switching on the new OSX.5 backup system, then spending tomorrow hunting down the stuff I would have gotten today (ethernet hub, new desk) if the delivery had been anything approaching timely.  Then it'll be repositioned in the living room so it can act as very large Lava Lamp when not otherwise occupied.  And I'll be back before you can say Centerville, Ottumwa, Fairfield, Mount Pleasant, Fort Madison, Burlington, Iowa City, Cedar Rapids, Grinnell and West Des Moines. 

In Other News, CBS Thinks Bobby Parker Is A Creep, And If He Thinks They're Still Going To The 8th Grade Dance Together He's Crazy.

SOME may say it's just the Vicodin talking (see below), but it started weeks before that. It started with Hillary's cleavage.

I know that people like to imagine otherwise, but the ruling coalition in this country (ruling because it has no more ability to govern than it has sufficient democratic instincts to do so) consists of a bunch of standard-issue Weekly Standard neo-fascists (I'm bringing it back! Why are "conservatives" like fascists? Because they are! Short, but it didn't take three years to get into some semblance of publishing shape, either) throwing shit at a wall to see what captures the, you should pardon the expression, "imagination" of the public. Which I suppose we all, fascist or not, do to some extent, but only these guys and their sorry-assed centrist Democrat dopplegängers get theirs broadcast by major networks or published by the Newspaper of Record.

(Speaking of the Gray Lady, I heard someone say that Kristol would be taking the Bill Safir(e) chair. It's true those two enjoy the commonality of being lying fascist bags of shit, but Safir(e) in his heyday was at least lively, even if you wouldn't have left your nine-year-old alone in a room with him. Kristol's taking the Tierney chair, folks. Tierney represented the Times' Pander Offensive; he was the New Yawk editor's idea of the sort of Midwesterner who finds David Brooks such a delightfully contrarian 19th century mind. In this, as always, we find a reassuring cluelessness, as when a regional symphony orchestra backs Van Halen, or Celine Dion tries to rock out. No Midwesterner reads David Brooks. Few have even heard of him. At any rate, the Tierney experiment is now officially a failure and it's time to return the space to the paranoid ravings of well-born East Coast hucksters, where it belongs.

(We can't pass this by without noting that Andrew Sullivan called Kristol "an extremely talented writer", proving that some people can't tell the difference between a Bartok string quartet and the mock pleadings of a buggered cabana boy.)

Where was I? Oh, so look at Hillary's cleavage. You would not have described it as such. Your grandmother would not have described it as such. It raised no boners beyond the terminally infantile erections of Right Blogtopia, and merited only a half-hearted What The Fuck among adults, but it was on the "News". And look what's happened since. The diapered fantasies of your mewling Chris Matthewses and your puking Tim Russerts, barely contained in the best of times, started boiling harder than an Irish dinner. (By the way, does anyone imagine either of these two has ever had sexual relations without both themselves and the victim being dead drunk?) The smooth-shaven Barack Obama suddenly had a message, and John Edwards suddenly had one that was being heard, his former Breck Girl locks now a Kennedyesque mop. Clearly some switch had been thrown, dear reader, and the resultant light was invisible to anyone with a healthy adult sex life.

Now, this points out a couple of things about the string pullers. One, they obviously realize that sex sells, as we all do, but they also know that infantile notions of sex sell best of all. It wasn't Gennifer Flowers got the faithful all riled up; it was the thought of Paula Jones kissing the Bent Clenis™. It wasn't schtupping Monica, it was leaving a stain. If Larry Craig had been caught in a Watergate suite with a male aide it wouldn't have played three days outside of Idaho. And two, I believe we can take it for granted that they share the Don't Fuck Mommy/Look I Made A Poo-Poo frame of reference; nobody with a healthy sex life could possibly care. We are under perpetual attack by the forces of infantile sexuality, not in a reasonably-well-adjusted, specialist-publication way, but in an Oh My God In A Public Men's Room! How Disgusting, and I Hope They Have More Pictures On A-18! sense.

Of course the real point is power, as it always is for the well-born erectile-deficient; leading the New American Gladiators crowd to the polls is just a means to that end, so once something like this takes hold it gets attached to "important" concepts (if it were all about sex Russert might begin to catch on at some point, though I doubt Matthews would) like Mike Huckabee Is Too Religious (a concept as wistless as the Clinton cleavage, and no less effective. As Jay B pointed out, seven years ago the EmEssEm were outraged someone would embarrass a Presidential candidate by asking him to name the president of Pakistan; now it's outraged that an utterance can be parsed to suggest an unfamiliarity with how its paperwork is progressing this week).

So I was not really surprised when NBC's Richard Engle broke the weekend wall-to-wall Bhutto: The Islamic Elvis bit (someone needs to explain the "she cracked her skull on the limo door" thing to me, though. Is this supposed to suggest it was suicide or something? Are they planning to indict Dr. Nick?) for this:

New bin-Laden Audio Proves Surge Is Working

(although I thought he should have added "Besides, he's too religious,") because that's exactly what NBC's "terrorist experts" said about the last bin-Laden audiotape, and hey, you go with what you know, plus the alternative--having accurately reported the truth about "al-Qaeda in Iraq" for the last four years--is as unthinkable as it is impossible. Still, it's plenty amusing to hear the same guys who were painting him as Goldfinger a couple years back now analyzing the terror threat contained in an intercepted 8-Track message to his evil hordes. Is it any wonder that the abiding symbol of our last war on Islamofascism is a cartoon mouse giving 'em the finger?

They Should Have At Least Read Me My Rights

SO two weeks ago I bunged up my knee while fighting crime rogering a pair of leggy supermodels getting out of my chair, and five days later I went to the immediate care place, where Dr. Surly kept me waiting forty-five minutes while he rogered the x-ray technician finished the application for his license reinstatement saw to the pressing medical needs of the two people who were there ahead of me, neither of whom (nagging cough, possible broken finger in a no-doubt drunken fall) appeared to justify the exhaustive search of 19th century case histories that was taking so much time, before sticking his head inside my room for one minute twelve seconds--I swear I saw nothing of him below the shoulders for another thirty minutes--to tell me there was probably nothing he could do for me, even though he hadn't even spoken to me to that point, let alone conducted what I believe is usually termed an "exam", and that he'd probably give me some Ibuprophen. This last, I believe, is a standard bit meant to scare you off. At any rate, if he thought I was gonna sit there for two hours and go home with anything short of Schedule II narcotics he was crazy. Thirty seconds later I heard him snapping at the x-ray tech about the fact that I was still in the exam room and not on her table. In three tries she got no images, so she rushed out and got the other technician, who was about half her age, and who said something I didn't quite catch about this having to happen when You Know Who was on duty, so I bonded with them, and then they put the plates directly under my leg instead of in the cabinet underneath, and the pictures turned out fine. Maybe the best I'd ever taken.

Dr. Surly returned--all of him this time--and did some more muttering, and actually touched the knee, and told me the x-rays showed "no breaks or tears". I would repeat this to the osteopath five days later, just to hear him confirm that tears wouldn't have shown up anyway. He said he suspects a meniscus tear; I think he probably suspects a scam to get prescription painkillers. He sent me for an MRI Saturday, either to see just what sort of damage there is, or to see how much I was willing to pay for a chance at additional scripts.

So Saturday morning I'm about to be swept into the Gaping Maw of Claustrophobia (no problem for me, but my Poor Wife has vowed never to have another) when the tech, who is far too cheery for 9 AM, asks what radio station I'd like to listen to. And I tell her I'm totally innocent of local radio, having last listened to it in 1972, and how about NPR? And she says, "We don't get that." And that's the end of the conversation, and without further discussion--which might have run something like "I'd rather have you scream in my ear for the next forty minutes than make me listen to most radio stations"--she snaps the headphones on me and the gurney starts to move, and there's a bunch of the usual local radio guff--disc jockey inanities followed by locally-produced commercials for some health club with zero production values--followed by "You've Got A Friend" by James Taylor.

And I knew I was in trouble. James Taylor is not a grand mal seizure of suckitude provided the dose is kept small, but there's no question he portends the sort of Lite Rock or "Adult" Contemporary--now that I think of it, why is 90% of the typical "Adult" Contemporary playlist twenty-five years old, let alone lyrically teenaged?--that serves as some sort of default listening position on the grounds that it's the stuff people who don't like music listen to. Which is, I would like to have explained to Excessively Cheerful, precisely bass ackwards, but it was too late. Here, to the best of my recollection--and I had nothing to do but remember it--was the rest of it:

"Lady" Little River Band
"Kiss You All Over" Exile
"Stuck on You" Lionel Ritchie
Something I Didn't Recognize by Someone Other Than Celine Dion but Close
"Make It With You" Bread
"Kiss Me" Sixpence None The Richer (the one song I actually like, but then I'm a sucker for hurdy-gurdies and women with that haircut)
"Jazzman" Carole King
Something Written By Jim Steadman on a Three-Day Piña Colada Bender and "Sung" by Someone Who Unfortunately Is Celine Dion
"All Out of Love" Air Supply

I would swear on my grandmother's grave this is true, but I figure if you're familiar with the concept there's really no need.

Caution. Men In Trees.

You might be right, Melinda , that experience doesn't make Hillary Clinton or John McCain the "safe" candidate in light of the Bhutto assassination. (I'll admit I've found myself warming to McCain while he survived the greatly exaggerated reports of his death, and as the other GOP candidates I thought I might support have begun flailing.) But (via the excellent Ed Morrissey )...

OH, I'm sorry; introductions. The writer being informed by the excellent Ed Morrissey here is the redoubtable Rachael Larimore, whom I like to think of as Slate's desperate attempt to prove that whole anti-contra-reverse-counterintuitive contrarianism schtick is in fact so genuine that it extends to their hiring practices.

...I hope that we can agree that Bill Richardson is a wildly dangerous candidate in comparison.

Let's back up just a bit here, but not enough we're tempted to mash the accelerator and smash into these people, forcing us to exchange insurance information: 1) Benazir Bhutto is assassinated, leading any number of Americans to feel they need to have an opinion about what this means. 2) Some of these Americans have column inches to fill, if only in cyberspace. 3) One of them is John Dickerson. 4) Dickerson decides that what it means is we'll be backing "safe" candidates like John McCain and Hillary Clinton from here on out, seeing as how we now know the world is a dangerous place, especially for opposition leaders returned from exile to the powderkeg of their homelands in a desperate attempt to make the US State Department look like a player. 5) The campaign discussion group at Slate then comment on his comments, after first checking Cap'n Ed to assure a firm grounding in Subcontinental politics.

Here's what Gov. Richardson had to say :

President Bush should press Musharraf to step aside, and a broad-based coalition government, consisting of all the democratic parties, should be formed immediately. Until this happens, we should suspend military aid to the Pakistani government. Free and fair elections must also be held as soon as possible. It is in the interests of the U.S. that there be a democratic Pakistan that relentlessly hunts down terrorists. Musharraf has failed, and his attempts to cling to power are destabilizing his country. He must go.

Really? He wants President Bush to overthrow the government of another country?

No! Really?

Fer chrissakes, "what Richardson had to say" would have been regarded, as recently as two years ago, by these very same people, as a sort of Hopeless Hippie Unicorn-Flavored Pacifism, assuming it wasn't aimed at someone the Bush administration had foolishly bet the farm on. And we can just forget about pointing out that Richardson initially supported overthrowing the government of Iraq; recognizing this would have required fact-gathering, and you can't put that sort of thing on a Slate expense voucher.

Now, the doctor told me that if I keep my head perfectly still in these sorts of situations I could minimize the risk of further, possibly catastrophic, injury. So, this being Slate 'n'all, let's see if we can manage to throw a net over what this might actually mean. Not that we necessarily have a net that large.

1) Larimore actually means it. Okay, that's impossible, you say; "conservatives", even the Facile Libertarian branch, actually live for overthrowing governments. Plus, the very idea that it would be shocking for Bush to overthrow another government is so absurd it must be an ironic suggestion. Fine, except a) this is Slate, after all; maybe they want you to think that and b) this is precisely the sense the excellent Cap'n makes of it: "Richardson is a dangerous kook for suggesting a serious US diplomatic response in terms which would allow someone like me to claim he supports a US-military-backed coup".

2) She means to chide Democrats. As in, "Right, now Democrats are in favor of overthrowing foreign governments with military force. Fucking peaceniks." We might raise the objection that this would negate the complaint: even if you can pump enough air into Richardson's remarks to make it sound like he's suggesting military action without the thing blowing up on you--and you can't--haven't you been cheering that sort of thing on (from the sidelines, despite one's Naval commission) for the better part of a decade now? But then, this is Slate and movement "conservatism", the land where Francis Bacon is a Sunday watercolorist. We would also note the Cap'n makes this argument, as well, but it wouldn't do the vertigo any good.

3. The Ol' Switcheroo. Having turned American foreign policy into a flaming bag of dogshit on the front porch, maybe they figure now is a good time to start whistling and walking in the opposite direction. This would certainly explain the elevation of Bill Richardson to Democratic Party spokesman and dead solid lock to be your next Secretary of State, a rise which must have pulled double-digit Gs, assuming gravity operates in Nowheresville, where the ride started. Unfortunately, the worst you can say about Distorto Bill Richardson is that he sounds sorta like a Republican, only saner. But maybe that's the thing they fear the most! Or, maybe...that's what they want you to think they fear the most! Ow, my head!

UPDATE: Okay, it's not an UPDATE, but the Cap'n had a really cool one about how Richardson did too use the word "force", so there. This was part of an internal debate with the "Richardson apologists" who plague his comments and those of every other right-wing site that allows them, however, we were somewhat unclear about how Richardson saying, as both we and the Cap'n quote, "We must use our diplomatic leverage and force the enemies of democracy to yield..." turns into a justification of taking "force" to mean whatever the fuck you say it means. So we scanned the piece again, and we're not about to do that without some marginal payoff. So here's a look at how this important matter is seen by Shot & Sail Republicans. Friggin' in the riggin':

The stupidity of this statement cascades through several levels. First and foremost, how would the US "force" Musharraf to step down? Should we invade Pakistan to fight on the side of al-Qaeda and the Taliban, who have pursued that same goal for the past six years, thanks to Musharraf's alliance with the US? Or does Richardson expect us to conduct an assassination?

Okay, first, we are simply going to ignore that business about Musharraf as sudden recipient of radical Islamic attentions on 9/12, after innocently siding with The Good Guys; it is, after all, merely a device to buttress the claim that Bill Richardson wants to send US military forces to fight side-by-side with, if not under the command of, Osama bin-Laden, and as such must be seen as fungo practice for a possible future Democratic administration. And we'll just pass on by that "diplomatic leverage...does that mean assassination, Bill?" routine, on the grounds that "diplomatic leverage" is an altogether foreign concept to the Right at this point, so it would not surprise us to find your average wingnut asking if it involved waterboarding, ice skates, or refried beans. We will simply note that Richardson had, in fact, answered the question before it was asked. That this answer is not taken as satisfactory is grounds for disputing it, impugning it, or questioning the sanity of the speaker, but it's not grounds for redefining common terms to make them mean what you wish they meant. But let us sail on:

Better yet, why should we dictate who runs Pakistan? Isn't that a rather bald assertion of so-called American imperialism?

The other day I jokingly remarked somewhere that the major cultural advantage of living in Indianapolis was that I could drive a couple miles down 16th Street and buy myself one of those head-restraint systems they use in auto racing and so avoid crippling whiplash injuries from crap like this. Now I wish I'd really done it. One: if you believe in something--and people who supported preemptive war in Iraq either believe in the right of the US to dictate to other governments, or they believe in nothing whatsoever, in which case they should have admitted so in 2002--or you don't, but you are not allowed to simultaneously profess belief and question others for apparently doing the same, without regard for the sometimes devastating effect that can have on the innocent soft tissues of other people's necks. Two: the single exception to this rule occurs when someone--let's call him "Bill"--has put forward a definition of "so-called American imperialism" which both rejects it and defines it as "dictating who runs something-or-other" and then urges precisely the opposite course of action. At this point you may criticize "Bill", but it'd be nice if you quote him to that effect while you're at it. Alternately you can a) praise him for finally seeing the intense otherworldly glow of your own brightness or b) shut up.

And after we somehow force Musharraf from power, what comes after? Even with a passive removal of support, something has to push Musharraf from power. Does Richardson have a clue what that might be?

In fact, he does, or he imagines he does, and it can be discerned by the simple expedient of reading what the man fucking said.

I'll give him a hint. We did the same thing in 1979 with Iran and the Shah.

So now, not content just to ignore what Richardson said in the first place, we offer to explain to him exactly what he said, except by faulty historical analogy, which, to the extent that it's true, undermines our own case! If you'll excuse me for a few minutes, I need to drive a few miles down 16th Street.

Okay, I'm back. Assuming that withdrawal of US military support led to the overthrow of the Shah--a man we'd actively propped on the Throne we righted for him, and who had spent every Cold-War dollar we'd given him in the intervening thirty-five years on pissing off every single subject who had survived genital electrocution--is gratuitous at best, and suggesting the Iranian Revolution represents an inevitability is pure flummery. Bhutto isn't wasn't a returning exhiled imam, she was a species of democrat; Musharraf didn't declare martial law to stave off the Taliban. If we believe that US political pressure, and not a popular uprising of his own people, overthrew the Shah, then we have to concede that Richardson is onto something, and we have to admit, under the circumstances, that it might result in an improved situation in Pakistan. Meanwhile, neither Pakistan's more powerful neighbors, nor the international community, is going to be comfortable with an Iranian-type Islamic revolution taking place.

Of course, a really, really good time to have thought about all this was before we threw in with an anti-democratic military strongman with a history of duplicitousness, just for the sake of some Bush-administration puffery and a guaranteed opportunity to capture bin-Laden and lead him down Pennsylvania Avenue as a prelude to remaking the Middle East. And how'd that one go?