Friend or Foe?

The fact that Osama bin Laden focuses his hatred on George Bush is a very good reason to vote for Bush. If American stands for anything anymore -- sometimes I'm not sure -- it has to be that Islamofascism and its terrorist minions are our mortal enemy. We don't make peace with them... sorry, Walter Cronkite. We kill them. If Osama didn't hate our President, he wouldn't have been doing his job.

Meanwhile, the old saw of Realpolitik is "the enemy of my enemy is my friend." Is it me, or did much of what bin Laden say seem like it came right out of Fahrenheit 9/11? If enough people notice that bin Laden's main points are not very distinguishable from aspects of the modern Democratic Party line, they're cooked.

GOTV!

The October 29th Surprise - Today's the Day Update!

Lots of people have concluded that the "October Surprise" from the Democrats that we feared has already happened -- that it was the Al Qaa Qaa "missing explosives" story. I still don't think so.

Savvy people -- Dick Morris comes to mind -- long ago concluded that Kerry isn't helped by focusing on Iraq, no matter what the news is, because if foreign policy, military effectiveness, national security are the main issues on which the vote turns, Republicans will always win, because most Americans long ago correctly decided that the modern Democratic Party exists somewhere within a range between pacifism and anti-Americanism. By focusing on Al Qaa Qaa, the Old York Times and CBS made a fundamental mistake of believing that what interests them -- American failure, American malfeasance, American incompetence -- will be convincing to the majority of Americans. But the majority of Americans have friends or family who have been in the military (I'll bet that isn't true about the bulk of journalists at NYT or CBS), and they know that the military isn't incompetent, but they also know that competence and professionalism doesn't mean perfection, and that the "fog of war" is, in fact, sometimes pretty foggy. This re-focus on Iraq and the question of "who do you trust to run the war?" isn't going to help Kerry a bit.

That's why I think this was a free-lance effort by NYT and CBS to help Kerry, not a move that the Kerry campaign would have wanted. I think the Kerry-coordinated "October Surprise" was supposed to be something that would attack Bush on domestic issues by trying to expose some personal, moral hypocrisy, which, in turn, Kerry hopes, will suppress the Christian and more specifically the Catholic vote in midwestern states Kerry needs like Wisconsin, Iowa, Minnesota, Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania. And I still think it will be dropped late in the day today so it will be the focus of news stories on the Sunday shows.

I think the "plan" for Kerry was always to do this, and that there will be a direct line from the "Mary Cheney is a lesbian" line in the debates to whatever happens today... that is, they will both be geared to suppress the votes of social conservatives, Reagan Democrats, pro-life, anti-gay marriage Catholics.

My latest guess is something along the lines of GWB paid for an illegal abortion in 1971; or, worse (and I really hate to think that they could go this low), that Jenna or Barbara had abortions more recently.

Pray that I'm wrong.

Turnout Barometers?

Slate has a feature detailing the reasons why nearly every single one of its staff and contributors will vote for Kerry. They are very interesting as an insight into the liberal mind -- many, for instance, seem consumed by hatred for Bush, and, tellingly, many of the women contributors deride book as too "cocky" or "cocksure." Methinks the Alan Alda left just does not like men.

Anyway, what struck me about the responses is that they expose what may turn out to be the Big Myth of 2004, namely, that this is an election that has the whole country excited and committed, and that we will therefore have enormous turnout at the polls. If the responses of these ultra-committed, ultra-tuned-in ultra-liberals is any indication, the odds on the average 24 year-old, never-before-voted, don't-own-property-and-don't-have-kids-so-I-don't-care-about-that-down-ballot-property-tax-referendum-and-couldn't-care-less-about-the-school-board slackers getting their ass off the couch, turning off MTV Real World and going over to the local library (could they find it? they might not be able to find their asses with two hands) is miniscule.

Here are some selections I culled:

Paul Berman: I'm voting for Kerry, with no great belief that he will be a first-rate president.

Daniel Drezner: I've never been less enthused about my choice of major party candidates—it's like being forced to decide whether The Matrix: Reloaded or The Matrix: Revolutions is the better movie…. I've reluctantly decided to back Kerry.

David Greenberg: I'd vote for practically anyone instead of Bush….

Christopher Hitchens: Kerry should be put in the pillory for his inability to hold up on principle under any kind of pressure…. Kerry should get his worst private nightmare and have to report for duty.

Mickey Kaus: I don't expect Kerry to be a successful president in any other respect.

Kathleen Kincaid: On Nov. 2, I will cast my ballot for John Kerry. Is he a strong candidate? No.

Jacob Weisberg: I remain totally unimpressed by John Kerry. Outside of his opposition to the death penalty, I've never seen him demonstrate any real political courage. His baby steps in the direction of reform liberalism during the 1990s were all followed by hasty retreats. His Senate vote against the 1991 Gulf War demonstrates an instinctive aversion to the use of American force, even when it's clearly justified. Kerry's major policy proposals in this campaign range from implausible to ill-conceived. He has no real idea what to do differently in Iraq. His health-care plan costs too much to be practical and conflicts with his commitment to reducing the deficit. At a personal level, he strikes me as the kind of windbag that can only emerge when a naturally pompous and self-regarding person marinates for two decades inside the U.S. Senate. If elected, Kerry would probably be a mediocre, unloved president on the order of Jimmy Carter.

Robert Wright: He's a long way from being the Messiah, but at least he's not the anti-Christ.


Conclusion? These are not the full-throated warblings of a committed movement for Kerry. Mark it down, you heard it hear first: turnout will be lower this year than last time.

Large Numbers and Liberal Lies

I like to stick to basics in teaching my children. I believe in phonics in reading and rote memorization of multiplication tables in math, and -- much underestimated -- we keep a globe handy for geographical questions and often just get it out to look at the world to try to understand where stuff is and how big things are.

These basics seem lost on much of the liberal media. A case in point is the current flap over 380 tons of high explosives that have gone missing in Iraq.

First, the evidence now shows that the HE went missing before Americans ever got to the facility. NBC, in this regard, has done itself momentarily proud by taking out a fraudulent story foisted on us in the last week of the campaign by CBS and the Old York Times. Good for them; shame on CBS and the Times.

Second, and more importantly in my opinion, there was no story to begin with. Four hundred tons sounds like a lot -- unless you can think with numbers. When you also learn that we've already captured and destroyed a thousand times that much in Iraqi explosives, the missing explosives don't seem like that big a deal. But you wouldn't have learned that extra fact -- the hundreds of thousands of tons we've captured and destroyed -- from CBS and the Times. That's how demogoguery works... you state a fact that you present as a scandal without giving any context that would show to any reasonable person that it's a non-story.

Third, and most important for my present point, the premise of these stories, and the complaints about the insurgency generally, is that the coalition forces could have secured every possible location in Iraq, captured every single bad guy, and rounded up every pound of ordinance immediately as part of, presumably, the perfect "plan" the omnicompetent John Kerry would have devised.

That's just silly as a matter of basic geography. Iraq is a country about the size of California... about 430,000 square kilometers. A square kilometer for those of the liberal media who don't understand such things, is 1000 meters by 1000 meters, or about 1 million square meters, or 100 hectares. That's about 40 acres. If we assigned every one of the 150,000 or so coalition troops who were part of the invasion force to search and secure an area of Iraq, they would each have had to search and secure around 100 acres. In my area of Milwaukee, that would be around 500 houses. One guy. Do the freaking math.

The notion of the perfect plan that could have accounted with perfection for every contingency and effortlessly secured all high explosives in a country that was basically just a big ammo dump -- not to mention taking time out to secure the supposedly missing priceless Iraqi Museum artifacts that the Left was exercised about in the spring of 2003 -- is just silly. Are we a silly people? Will we buy this stuff? I hope not. We'll see in a week.

UPDATE: Oak Leaf is a must-read on Polipundit beating up Kerry's use of this story.

World Series

My first clear memories of baseball are of the 1967 World Series between the Cardinals and the Red Sox when I was 8 years old. Now my son, who is nearly eight, will have a Cardinals-Red Sox World Series as his first great memory of baseball. For me, it was Gibson versus Lonborg, with Brock, Flood, Cepeda, Shannon, Javier, Maxvill, and McCarver leading the Cards. For my boy it will be... well, the pitchers aren't that great on either side, but the old Cards didn't have sticks like Pujols, Rolen, Edmonds, Walker, Renteria etc. We're wearing our Cardinals hats all day. Life doesn't get better than this.

The October 29th Surprise - Update II

Here is another, uglier story:

E. Bush paid for an illegal abortion. Source: http://www.democrats.com/display.cfm?id=159, which also provides a keen, unintended insight into the paranoia and hatred that animates the extreme left.

I frankly doubt the Dems would pull this one because it could be so easily "discredited" by associating it with its first purveyor, the pornographer, Larry Flynt, who told the story on Crossfire in 2000. On the other hand, it would fit with what I perceive to be a key strategy of the Kerry campaign, namely, to blur the lines between Bush and Kerry as they may be viewed by conservative Evangelicals and Reagan Democrats/Catholics in Iowa, Wisconsin, Ohio and Pennsylvania, and either depress or manipulate their vote. Kerry is pro-gun control, which they don't like, so he does photo ops with guns and ducks. Kerry is pro-abortion, which they don't like, but he prominently mentions that he was an altar boy and believes life begins at conception (regardless of the contradictions in his positions). Kerry is pro-gay, sure, so he outs Mary Cheney to make sure that they know that Bush and Cheney are wishy-washy on the issue too. Why wouldn't he also want to blur the lines on abortion even further by saying, look, Bush paid for an abortion?

This is the standard tack of the left. They don't want to be honest and simply attack the moral values that middle America holds dear, even though they do not believe them and believe instead that we are rubes. No, they just want to say that Republicans are hypocrites because they pretend to believe in those values, but behave differently.

Now, to be honest, I don't know whether a story about Bush and abortion is true or false. Frankly, it wouldn't be astonishing to me to believe that Bush, who admits to having a wild youth, did, in fact, pay for an abortion in the early 1970s, at the height of the sexual revolution, when he was unmarried, when he was a flyboy, when he was a drinker and partier, etc. If he did, though, where is the hypocrisy? He says he was born again later. He says that he regrets much of his past. I assume he has prayed for forgiveness and redemption. That's what Christianity is for, after all. It's as if Democrats have forgotten that Christianity isn't about living a sinless life, it's about the fact that we are all sinners and that Christ died for our sins.

Ah, well. I just hope that the Dems don't drag some poor 60 year old woman through the mud just to bring an episode like this to light. It just wouldn't be decent. Don't there just have to be some things that they won't do to get elected?

Maybe not.

The October 29th Surprise - Update

Another aspect of the blogosphere that is both reassuring and deflating is that you are constantly bumping up against the fact that your most brilliant analysis (or so you think) has already been the subject of a lot of other people's analyses on their blogs. Reassuring, because the blogosphere tells you you're not alone in your thoughts and worries, and that other people are seeing what you're seeing. Deflating... well, for the same reason I was deflated when I got to college and realized there were a lot of people out there who were smarter than I was.

Anyway, many people are talking about the late October surprise, and what it might be. Although the story has been out there before, another suggested possibility is:

D. Bush Flying Under the Influence. Source: http://flyunderthebridge.blogspot.com/ and the wonderful commenters at Polipundit.

Lorie Byrd

Lorie Byrd does great great work for www.polipundit.com and is obviously a very nice person too. She has linked my neophyte blog on her own page at http://byrddroppings.typepad.com/byrd_droppings/2004/10/the_october_29t.html. The blogosphere is what the Old Media only pretends to be... a real community fostering real communication that is truly open to the public, and that doesn't place barriers to entry (either economic or reputational a la "My blog is bigger than yours") in the way of letting ideas flow. This is Gutenberg all over again, folks, and we're living it.

Thanks, Lorie!

Cardinal Nation!

No politics yet today. I am still basking in the glow of the Cardinals 5-2 victory over the Astros last night. What a game and what a series! The Astros were great down the stretch and probably the second best team in baseball by the end of the season. But I couldn't help thinking while the media was hyping Carlos Beltran as the next Barry Bonds or next Willie Mays that the best young slugger in baseball was, in fact, on the field in the series, but his name was the Cards' Albert Pujols, who has averaged 40 HRs and 126 RBIs a year for his first four years in the bigs. And the best center fielder in the league is not Carlos Beltran; as he proved last night, it's Jim Freakin'-Unbelievable-Over-the-Shoulder-How-Did-He-Do-That? Edmonds.

Now the midwestern, salt-of-the-earth Red State Cards move on to cruch the effete, out-of-touch Massachusetts girlie men Red Sox.

Okay, so maybe a little politics got in there. So sue me.

The October 29th Surprise

October 29 is the Friday before the election. In the last two close elections, 1992 and 2000, Democrats dropped bombshells on the Republican candidate on the Friday before the election, ensuring a weekend of captive left-liberal media attention, Republican defensiveness, and undecided voters wavering, wavering, and then going Democratic. In 1992 Bush I had pulled even with Clinton in many polls by the last week of the campaign, but Lawrence Walsh rode to the rescue by unsealing the indictment of Cap Weinberger, Reagan's defense secretary, for Iran-Contra, the Friday before the election. In 2000, of course, Bush II was hit by a thirty-year old DUI arrest. The Democrats have shown so far in this election that they will:

• Shoot guns at Republican headquarters;
  
• Break into and steal computers from Republican headquarters;
  
• Invade Republican state headquarters;
  
• Steal or deface Republican yard signs;
  
• Pay felons to register voters;
  
• Pay crack addicts in crack to register voters;
  
• Forge National Guard documents and air national news stories based on the forgeries;
  
• Out a lesbian, Mary Cheney, just because she happens to be the daughter of a Republican Vice-President;
  
• Claim "miracle cures" are on the horizon through stem-cell research, if only Kerry is elected;
  
• Demogogue the draft, social security, the War in Iraq, you name it, with shameful misrepresentations and out-and-out lies;
  
• I could go on and on.
  

What makes you think that they won't drop a bombshell on the Friday before the election again? Obviously, they will. So what will it be? I'm going to make some guesses over the next two weeks. Here are some possible guesses for the headline story on Friday, October 29, 2004:

A. "BUSH ARRESTED FOR MARIJUANA POSSESSION IN 1975."

B. "KARL ROVE INDICTED IN SPY SCANDAL." (the Valerie Plame story)

C. "BUSH DRUNK ON DUTY IN NATIONAL GUARD."

B has some surface plausibility, but I think it will have to be something personal like A and C to drive down the Christian conservative vote in places like Wisconsin, Ohio and Florida. That's how the Democrats think.

Reasons to Vote Against Kerry (The Teresa Factor)

5. Teresa. I don't know quite how to get my arms around this quote from Teresa Heinz Kerry:

Q: You'd be different from Laura Bush?
A: Well, you know, I don't know Laura Bush. But she seems to be calm, and she has a sparkle in her eye, which is good. But I don't know that she's ever had a real job - I mean, since she's been grown up. So her experience and her validation comes from important things, but different things. And I'm older, and my validation of what I do and what I believe and my experience is a little bit bigger - because I'm older, and I've had different experiences. And it's not a criticism of her. It's just, you know, what life is about.

Where to start? "Real job"? Many people have noted that Laura Bush was a schoolteacher and librarian until she married W at age thirty-one, that she had a master's degree, etc. Others have noted the insult to stay-at-home mothers implicit in the notion that raising children is somehow not a "real job." (I can tell you that my wife -- who, like Laura Bush, worked until 31 and then began staying home with our children -- would not be pleased if I described what she does all day as wife, homemaker, mother, Parish trustee, free-lance writer, etc., as not being a "real job.")

No, the thing that jumped out for me was her notion that somehow her experience of life has been "bigger" than Laura Bush's. I think there is probably an argument there -- she's lost a husband, after all, which is certainly an experience that cannot be underestimated, she was born overseas and has experience of other cultures, etc. On the other hand, I think it's probably pretty safe to assume that Laura Bush's experiences as the daughter-in-law of a Vice President and President, sister-in-law of the governor of Florida, and wife of the governor of Texas and President of the United States have been pretty darn big too. Let's face it, neither of these women are exactly your run-of-the-mill housewives.

The fact of the matter is, for the past ten years at least, and realistically for the past twenty-five years, Laura Bush's "job" has been being the wife of a prominent public figure. Just in this campaign, look what she does -- give speeches, give interviews, etc. As first lady, she directs an office and has a significant schedule of public events on her own, and her own staff. The Man from Mars Test is applicable here... a Man from Mars would look down at Laura Bush and see someone doing things that are indistinguishable from his perspective from the things that other people of substantial accomplishment and responsbility are doing, namely, a person with a high-powered "job" indeed.

So the upshot of this is that the silliness of Teresa Kerry's remark is not that it is a rip on stay-at-home housewives or women without "real jobs"; the silliness stems from the fact that Laura Bush obviously wouldn't fit those categories anyway. But the real problem is the condescension that suggests that Person A's "experience" is somehow deeper and more profound that Person B's experience. I think as a general matter this is a dangerous tack. You can never really know what another person has been through. The notion that my experience is somehow ontologically deeper or "bigger" than yours is an argument from authority, not from facts or logic. It has the same rhetorical structure as saying that "I went to Harvard and you went to Texas, so I'm smarter than you," or saying that "My daddy is a doctor and your daddy is just an electrician, so I'm better than you."

This is all probably making a mountain out of a molehill, but the comment does say something about Teresa's elitism that I think a lot of Americans won't like.

On the other hand, she's an odd duck, this Teresa Kerry, but I sort of like the fact that she seems to spit the bit every now and then. You just know that the Kerry campaign has her wrapped up tight. Her gaffes may actually be a sign of the eccentric human being she is trying to break out of the festival of banality that is any Presidential campaign.

More Reasons to Vote Against Kerry

Just because I didn't post in the past couple of days doesn't mean that I haven't been keeping track of the reasons not to vote for John Kerry. Here's a big one:

4. Voter fraud. In Milwaukee the City asked the County government to print an extra 300,000 ballots in preparation for November 2nd. That's on top of the previous printings of some 600,000+ ballots, for a total of more than 900,000 ballots to be printed and available for "use," in a city that only has 600,000 or so residents, and only around 350,000 or so registered voters. Thus, even if 66% of the voters who are registered turn out on November 2nd -- which would obviously be an extraordinary turnout -- the City will still only have have 200-250,000 voters, meaning that there will be 700,000 more ballots available for "use" than they need, i.e., two or three extra for each City voter.

And what will that "use" of these extra ballots be? Recall that Milwaukee was the place last time around in 2000 that Democratic operatives were trading cigarettes for votes, and then use your imagination. Wisconsin went for Gore by 5,000 votes in 2000. Do the math.

Democrats, of course, will say that the extra ballots are only needed to ensure that people who might spoil their ballots will have access to replacements. I don't know what's more insulting about this argument: that the Democrats think the public and the press are stupid enough to buy this horse manure (well, maybe the press is), or that the Democrats apparently think that their own inner city voters are so stupid that they will spoil two or three ballots apiece before they get it right?

Democrats are going to cheat, cheat, cheat, and then litigate, litigate, litigate if their cheating doesn't work. The only way to beat them is to work, work, work and vote, vote, vote.

UPDATE: The 2000 cigarettes-for-votes story from Milwaukee apparently wouldn't be enough to get any attention this year. In Ohio Democrats are apparently trading crack cocaine for voter registrations. Here's the link: http://www.toledoblade.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20041019/NEWS09/410190343. You can't make this stuff up.

Reasons to Vote Against Kerry.

I'm going to try to keep a running list for the next two-and-a-half weeks, because it's very hard to keep all of the reasons in my head at once, and because new reasons keep emerging.

1. Don't vote for Kerry because Charles Krauthammer, a doctor and a paraplegic, and Bill Frist, a world-renowned heart surgeon, are a lot smarter than John Edwards, an ambulance-chasing plaintiffs' med-mal lawyer, about the prospects or lack thereof of miraculous cures of Alzheimer's, paralysis, and other intractable neurological ailments. Edwards' Christopher Reeve quote was shameful demogoguery. Chris Reeve wouldn't have gotten up and walked in 2005, not in 2006, not in 2050. It isn't going to happen. Medicine is wonderful, but, in terms of scientific complexity, open-heart surgery is to regenerating neural connections like plumbing is to silicon chips.

2. Don't vote for Kerry because outing Mary Cheney on national TV was despicable gay-baiting designed to appeal to bigots but, more importantly, because Kerry is so out-of-touch that he thinks that there are a substantial number of Catholics and Evangelicals who could be swayed by it. There aren't.

3. Don't vote for Kerry because he keeps hinting ominously that there will be a draft if Bush if re-elected. There won't be. The military doesn't want it, the President doesn't want it, Republicans don't want it, and you don't want it. This, again, is sheer demogoguery.

I'll be back with more.

Proving a negative and hearing what isn't said.

People have noted the seeming irony that President Bush did better on domestic policy in the debates than he did on foreign policy. But domestic policy issues can be discussed in the sunshine, and the administration's actions and proposals can be freely aired. In foreign policy, in an age of terrorism and at a time of war, there is much that cannot be revealed by a sitting President who is Commander-in-Chief. The President cannot, for instance, reveal what he undoubtedly knows about the continuing threat from al Qaeda; cannot reveal what Special Forces and CIA operatives are doing inside Iran or Syria; cannot reveal sub rosa deals that may have been cut with Saudi Arabia or Pakistan to provide information and assistance in countering terrorist networks; cannot reveal contingency plans to take out Iranian or North Korean nuclear facilities; cannot reveal what he may know about corruption at the UN or the top levels of the Chirac government in France, etc., etc. Meanwhile, John Kerry, as the challenger, can say anything (and is obviously willing to say anything). It's not a level playing field, at least in terms of a debate.

This unfairness is clearest in the case of what should be the salient fact in this election. We were hit on 9/11/01 by terrorists in the heart of our economy and the heart of our government. More than three years later... knock on wood hard... we haven't been hit again. Does anyone believe that there haven't been plots to hit us again? But nothing has happened. It's hard to prove a negative -- why something didn't happen. One inference would be that this is sheer luck. Another inference is that this is The Extraordinary Military-Intelligence-Law Enforcement Victory That Dare Not Speak Its Name. I think the second inference is more valid, because the first requires you to believe that the vast expenditures on the military, the intelligence apparatus (including the enormous information collecting of the NSA), and homeland security are useless. Yet President Bush cannot trumpet this success -- and the media obviously won't trumpet it for him -- because to do so would mean to compromise the sources of information that led us to foil the plots. He's the President. He has the responsibility for safeguarding those secrets, even if it means he does poorly in foreign policy debates, and even if it means that he is defeated.

Given the attack in Spain on the eve of the election, given the attacks on Australia before their election, a rational observer has to conclude that al Qaeda and other Islamofascist terrorist groups are actively targeting the U.S. in the run up to November 2nd. If we get to November 2d and nothing has happened, President Bush deserves to win in a landslide. Whether he will or not depends on whether people can think, not about what has happened in the past three years, but about what has happened, and can listen, not to the rhetoric of the candidates, but to what isn't being said.

Novelists are, apparently, nincompoops.

Slate has a "survey" up consisting of comments by American novelists on the election at http://slate.msn.com/id/2107890/. It is a remarkable document and reminds me again why I fled academia and teaching literature for the law. These people are remarkable ninnies, hysterical know-nothings who mouth the received wisdom of the left-liberal media-Hollywood-academia-Iowa Writers' Workshop cocoon. Joyce Carol Oates' comment is most illuminating, and recalls Pauline Kael's famous comment about Richard Nixon's 49 state triumph in 1972. Befuddled, Kael wrote, "None of the people I know voted for Nixon." Now Oates writes, "Like virtually everyone I know, I'm voting for Kerry. And probably for exactly the same reasons."

These people never talk to anyone who won't nod at them and say, "yes, yes, oh, yes, I agree, completely!" They don't even know the basic factual arguments that their arguments would need to deal with in order to hold any water at all. For instance, a writer named Dan Chaon (never heard of him) says he's "alarmed" by Bush's "attacks on civil liberties." Does he know that both Kerry and Edwards voted for the Patriot Act and that the Patriot Act only gives law enforcement the same tools for terrorists it has to fight organized crime? He says he's also alarmed "by the deliberate lies that brought us into a poorly planned war." Is he aware that Kerry, as a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, saw the same intelligence Bush did and voted to give him authorization for the war? Is he aware of the fact that the Clinton administration made regime change in Iraq our national policy in 1998? He is alarmed by "tax cuts which (that?) so nakedly benefit the very few to the detriment of almost everybody else." Is he aware that everybody got a tax cut, that the top-end tax payers now pay a greater percentage of the total income tax than they did before, that many of the so-called "rich" are actually subchapter-S corporations that do most of the hiring in America, that nearly 50% of Americans pay no income tax whatsoever? Does he understand that the unemployment rates in high-tax, highly-redistributionist countries like France and Germany are nearly double the American rates? Chaon is also alarmed by "the ugly, merciless No Child Left Behind educational policy." Could he go back into the Senate records and find out that Kerry voted for it too? Finally, he is alarmed by "the reckless budget deficit." Does he know any history? Economics? Basic math? Can he figure out the percentage of GDP -- the only meaningful way to measure a deficit -- that the current deficit represents? Does he understand that it is not very large historically, and that running deficits to get out of a recession to stimulate growth is mainstream Econ 101 policy? (Oh, I forgot, he was probably an English major and never took an economics class.)

Here's the clincher. Chaon writes, "I find myself particularly repelled by Bush's professed 'Christianity,' even as his administration repudiates every value that Christ represents. He's probably not the Antichrist, but he comes as close as I've seen in my lifetime." So there we have it, at bottom the left is an irrational Manichaean worldview, Manichaean because it views the world as a battle of good versus evil, irrational because they are convinced that Christian conservatives are the evil enemy, and not the Islamofascists who murdered 3000 Americans in the heart of our biggest city.

Kerry's Press Conference

Here is my favorite passage from John Kerry's "press conference" about Iraq:

KERRY: ... Al Qaeda is in 60 countries. Are we invading all 60 countries? 35 to 40 countries had the same --more-- capability of creating weapons, nuclear weapons, at the time the president invaded Iraq than Iraq did. Are we invading all 35 to 40 of them? Did we invade Russia? Did we invade China?

Let's break this down logically by a process of elimination.

1. He says Al Qaeda is in 60 countries. Presumably he concedes that one of those 60 is Iraq. Minor point: but doesn't that undercut the argument that there was no connection between Iraq and al Qaeda?

2. He says 35-40 countries had as much or more capability than Iraq of creating nuclear weapons. But how many of those were also among the 60 countries that had al Qaeda cells? And how many of those were countries where the government itself was supportive of anti-West and anti-American terrorism? Probably not that many.

[As a sidebar, are there really 35-40 countries that may have the capacity to create nuclear weapons? That seems highly exaggerated, unless he's talking at a very high level of abstraction, i.e., the country has the intellectual and material resources, if they decide to, to create nuclear weapons, regardless of whether they have any intent to do so. (For instance, Belgium might have the intellectual and material resources to do so, but no one lies awake worrying about the Belgians.)]

3. Going back to point #2, how many of however many (probably very few) countries there are left who have active Al Qaeda cells, and the capacity to create nuclear weapons, and a history of supporting anti-West, anti-American, Islamofascist terrorism, also have (a) a history of using WMD's against their own people and others (b) invaded two other nations within the past twenty years; (c) defied a dozen years of UN sanctions and resolutions; (d) shot at American planes thousands of times during a decade-long sanctions regime; (e) gave asylum to a terrorist who was a member of the 1993 plot to blow up the World Trade Center; (f) gave $25,000 bounties to Palestinian suicide bombers who murdered Israeli civilians, including children; (g) committed genocide within their own borders; and (h) conspired to assassinate a former President of the United States?

I think the answer is, only one, and that country was Iraq. The notion that Iraq wasn't anything unique to be concerned about is as specious as the argument that if Bush would invade Iraq, he'd have to logically invade lots of other countries too.

Finally, for my money, conspiring to assassinate President George H.W. Bush was all I needed to know about Iraq and Saddam. The instant Clinton learned of that plot in the 1990s he should have gone to Congress and gotten a declaration of war. If we don't have a policy that you can't even think about assassinating our President without dying, we should.

The Debate I - Sentencing Guidelines

While the campaign is raging, other news continues to happen. One bit of legal news on my radar screen because of a pro bono case I'm doing is the fate of the federal Sentencing Guidelines, particularly as they are applied to defendants convicted of drug trafficking crimes. The Guidelines prescribe (via a table) certain numbers of months of incarceration corresponding to certain quantities of drugs involved in the crime. Typically, however, a United States Attorney will indict a drug dealer for conspiring to sell "5 or more" or "50 or more" grams of crack cocaine, but then the Judge, in the sentencing phase, will find that the "relevant conduct" of the offender is a hundred or a thousand times as much, and sentence accordingly. Last summer, the Supreme Court called into question this kind of judicial fact-finding under a parallel Washington state sentencing guidelines scheme as violating the Sixth Amendment's right to a jury trial in criminal proceedings. See Blakely v. Washington, ___ U.S. ___, 124 S.Ct. 2431, ___ L.Ed.2d ___ (2004),. The Seventh Circuit extended this analysis to the federal guidelines in United States v. Booker, 375 F.3d 508 (7th Cir. 2004), and this case is now up to the Supreme Court on an expedited schedule. Oral argument was last Monday.

This is extraordinarily important. If the Supreme Court upholds Booker, literally hundreds of thousands of federal prisoners will have to be resentenced. Then, the government will have to come up with some new way to sentence drug crimes that will pass constitutional muster.

There has been practically no talk this campaign season about "law and order" issues, which is odd, considering that Kerry is anti-death penalty. Someone should ask the candidates: "If the Supreme Court throws out the federal sentencing guidelines, what do you propose to do?"

Cardinals Tonight!

No more blogging today.... Cardinals v. Dodgers live from Busch! My dream is a Cardinals-Yankees or Cardinals-Red Sox World Series, because my earliest memories of baseball are the 1964 World Series when I was five years old, and the 1967 World Series with El Birdos led by the great Orlando Cepeda and the even greater Bob Gibson. Someone should write a history of how America's attitudes toward race were transformed by white suburban kids growing up in the 1960s idolizing great black athletes and great men like Gibson, Lou Brock and Curt Flood. Unfortunately, I've got to do some more work here so I can get home for the game. :)

The Duelfer Report II - The Hindsight Rule

I've been thinking about analogies to the kind of second-guessing of President Bush's decision to invade Iraq we're now seeing, looking for them in my own field, the law. In trust law, there is a basic precept governing how trustees' investment decisions should be judged known as the "Hindsight Rule." The Hindsight Rule is as follows:

In judging the reasonableness of the trustee’s investments, the court will not be affected by hindsight. It will endeavor to place itself in the position of the trustee at the time he made the investment and not to charge him with knowledge of what has happened since the investment.

See Bogert, Trusts and Trustees (3d ed.) (2000), § 612 at 60.

The conduct of the trustee in making an investment is to be judged as of the time when he made it and not as of some later time…. A wisdom developed after an event, and having it and its consequences as a source, is not a fair standard to apply.

See William F. Fratcher, Scott on Trusts (1987), § 227 at 433.

If we say, by analogy, that President Bush was entrusted with the security of America, and was acting as a trustee at the time when he decided to invade Iraq, the question becomes, based on the information he knew then, was the action he took prudent and reasonable. A court of law would obviously say, "yes." What the media and the Democrats are trying to do is to apply "a wisdom developed after the event, and having its consequences as its source." It's patently unfair, and no court would let them do that.

Moreover, it is also a hindsight that is dependent on the "consequences" of the President's actions. If we hadn't gone into Iraq, in the best case we wouldn't know, even now, that Saddam didn't have weapons of mass destruction. In the worst case, the French and Russians would have conspired to get sanctions lifted, and Saddam would have begun developing them and perhaps by now would, in fact, have reconstituted them.

The Duelfer Report I

The spin on Charles Duelfer's report on WMD is predictably that there were no "stockpiles," therefore the rationale for the war was wrong and (implicitly) the rationale for a Bush second term is undercut. The rationale for the war as I understood it was essentially pre-emptive: based on our best intelligence, Saddam probably has WMD (no one knew for sure... that's what relying on intelligence means), which also obviously meant that there was a chance that he didn't have them, but we can't take that risk post-9/11. Fisking Duelfer's 1500 page report would obviously take a lot of time, but it's surprising to me that no mainstream media reports so far have appeared to quote the very first sentence of Duelfer's section titled "Key Findings." That sentence reads:

"Saddam Husayn so dominated the Iraqi Regime that its strategic intent was his alone. He wanted to end sanctions while preserving the capability to reconstitute his weapons of mass destruction (WMD) when sanctions were lifted."

That seems like a real threat to me. Isn't it a fact that many countries, including France and Russia (and including much of the left in America), were pushing to lift sanctions against Iraq in the late 1990s and early 2000s? So, doesn't that mean that Saddam was poised to reconstitute his WMD programs?

If the Left had its way, Saddam would still be in power, the sanctions would have been lifted, and he would be well on his way to having WMDs. Why does any of this undercut the rationale for war?

UPDATE: The "Key Findings" of the Duelfer report, in fact, states that "Iraq was within striking distance of a de facto end to the sanctions regime, both in terms of oil exports and the trade embargo, by the end of 1999."

All is Right With the World.

Cardinals beat the Dodgers in the opening game of their series, 8-3. All is right with the world. The Cards got a great start from Woody Williams, and home runs from Pujols, Walker (2), Edmonds and Matheny. Nice to see Larry Walker get some time on the playoff stage after spending too many years in Colorado. It's also great to see Edmonds break out of a 1 for 29 slump to end the season. Life is good.

Now, if Cheney can make Edwards look like the lightweight he is, all will really be right with the world.

Palace and Mosque

I got off a plane in Washington on Thursday night at 11:00 p.m. and caught a cab from Reagan National to the Grand Hyatt in downtown Washington. My cab driver was a Muslim gentleman from Somalia, who was anxious to tell me his thoughts about the debate. His basic point was that both Bush and Kerry were too much into being "warriors," and when was someone going to speak about "peace and prosperity"? Anyway, it was a cordial talk, and I was careful not to say anything that would offend him or hurt his feelings, less because he was a Muslim, and frankly more because he was my cabdriver, and I generally think it's good manners to be deferential toward people who are providing you a personal service.

Friday I had a very short hearing in the D.C. Superior Court and then had four hours to kill before my plane trip back to Milwaukee, so I went to the National Gallery of Art, which is always wonderful. One exhibit in the East Wing was particularly striking: entitled "Palace and Mosque," it presented art and artifacts of Islamic civilization -- rugs, pottery, tiles, etc. -- all quite beautiful and presented with extreme deference to the Islamic religion.

Friday afternoon, then, at the airport, I had a very nice chat with a pretty young girl who was making me a Caffe Mocha while I waited for my flight. She was also a Muslim, from Ethiopia.

Anyway, because I was flying to Washington on Thursday night for the hearing, I had missed the Presidential debate, but I caught much of the post-debate gnashing of teeth and caught up on the blogs yesterday. One thing that leapt out at me (and many others) was Kerry's notion that we shouldn't have nuclear bunker-buster bombs if we are trying to keep terrorists from getting nuclear weapons. The logic of this is an inescapable moral equivalence between us and them. We can't be trusted with keeping the peace any more than they can.

My question is: can you imagine a respectful presentation of Western art in Iran? Saudi Arabia? Syria? Isn't it interesting that, after 9/11, America remains respectful and even protective of the feelings of citizens and visitors who happen to be Muslim?

There is no moral equivalence. We are the good guys. John Kerry doesn't seem to "get it."