Obsidian Wings

Moe Lane Went To Bed Early Open Thread #1

Opening topic: Kerry's attempts to mend fences with Southern voters.

Top Ten.

The Commissar has come up with a very interesting set of rules for blogging; I dunno if I agree with all of them, but I'm going to follow Rule #1 right now and merely set up a couple of open threads.

Moe

What an odd story.

Well, the new Iraqi paper al-Mada (whose editor, one Fakhri Karim, comes from a Marxist background and was pro-liberation of Iraq. A year ago I would have said that was a contradiction in terms, but then a year ago I wasn't really aware of SIAW or Norm Geras)... right, the paper in question has apparently amassed quite a list of people and groups with their hands in the oil jar. Is it true?

Well, so far the Washington Times and the UK Independent have both produced articles about it which are non-skeptical in tone. No, that doesn't precisely fill me with confidence, either. The fact that the article's translation comes from MEMRI doesn't really concern me, but people have commented on that site's slant in the past, so I'm noting that I'm aware of the controversy. Then there's the oddities of just how these bribes were supposed to take place: it's not so much the idea of bribing people with millions of barrels of oil that raises an eyebrow as is the difficulty of keeping it all secret. Finally, the list itself - well, here's one example:

"The 8th of October Movement, a Brazilian Communist group, received 4.5 million barrels".

Umm, why?

So, I think some further verification is in order, and I'll save my further comments until such time as it's forthcoming.

Moe

PS: And it would seem Tacitus agrees with me. Well, I've already written this out...

(Via the Instaman and Slings & Arrows)

Shooting the wounded?

Poster Fredrik Nyman provided us* with a link to a TCS column by John Ellis called Shooting the Wounded, which gives some suggestions on how Kerry should run the next stage of his campaign. In short, Ellis advocates a strategy first formulated by Lee Atwater (whose name has much the same effect on Democrats as Nathan Bedford Forrest's did on whatever Union army was facing him at the time, and not for completely dissimilar reasons**):

The turning point of the 1988 Republican presidential nomination campaign came just after the New Hampshire primary, where then-Vice President George H.W. Bush had bounced back from a humiliating third-place finish in Iowa to defeat Sen. Bob Dole by 9 percentage points. In the days that followed, a debate raged within the Bush campaign about how to allocate its remaining resources. Campaign strategist Lee Atwater argued that the only thing to do was dump everything into South Carolina and the Super Tuesday states that followed three days later. "Shoot the wounded," said Atwater at the time, "that's my view."

Atwater's view prevailed. The Bush campaign buried South Carolina and the Super Tuesday states under an avalanche of money, organizational muscle, surrogates and media advertisements. When the votes were counted, Bush had run the table, sweeping all but the states of Washington and Missouri, and the race was over.

I’m watching her go.

She divorced her alcoholic husband, went to Columbia, and got a Masters in Library Science. It was just before World War II. When she met and married my grandfather, only he (and she) were happy among their relations.

They settled in Worcester, Massachusetts. They worked as librarians for Clark University. My grandfather’s portrait hangs in Clark's library today. In the early sixties, they bought some land on the coast of Maine and built a small summer home. My father and his two brothers were almost teenagers, then.

Over the years, as my father and uncles grew older, they’d bring their families to the summer home in Maine. I was the first grandchild -- her first grandson, she would remind me. A kiss on the cheek and then back to the cocktail party, where communists and lesbians and historians and gay men (shh, don’t say that) would be having the time of their lives. “Don’t waste good gin on tonic,” she’d instruct in a stage whisper, “and never trust anyone who drinks only vodka.”

Being the first grandchild had its privileges. One summer, when I was eleven, my grandfather was sitting in his favorite Morris chair, waiting for Jim Lehrer to come on. He was three months away from succumbing to lung cancer. I wanted to watch CHiPs, and started to cry. He changed the channel and watched it with me. I was such a little shit.

My grandmother prospered after my grandfather was gone, if truth be told. Always casting herself against type, she grew more liberal as she aged. In her eighties, she said “Pulp Fiction” was her favorite movie. Her mail was a fascinating collection of come-ons from the ACLU, People for the American Way, and the Sierra Club. She briefly changed her residency to Maine because the Democrats didn’t need another vote in Massachusetts. I remember her arguing endlessly with my father, the up-and-coming economics professor (who broke her heart by voting for Clark, the libertarian, in 1980). “I don’t care if you’re right,” she said. “I don’t care.”

She’s dying now. If not for the breast cancer, or the emphysema, or the heart condition (pop-flutter-flutter-pop), she might live out the year. I called her not so long ago and her voice -- always so strong, always so wise -- couldn’t wait for the call to be over.

There are people who only live, and then die for something. And there are people who live for something, and then only die. I know which I think is worse.

This is an open thread.

At last, an inquiry (Arar #21)

(21st in a series. In case you don't like scrolling up from the bottom of the page, here are links to the previous posts in chronological order: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20.)

As Paul noted in the comments to my last post, Canada has announced a public inquiry into the Arar case.

It will not surprise anyone that I think this is an important, and long overdue, step. I can only hope that:
1) the truth, or at least more of it, comes out, and
2) this leads to more examination of this case in the United States.

Unfortunately, I don't think #2 is likely. From the AP story above:

O'Connor will not be able to force U.S. authorities to participate in the inquiry. A public investigation into how intelligence on both sides of the border tracks suspected terrorists is not expected to be welcomed by Washington.

.

Someone asked State Department spokesman Richard Boucher about this at a press briefing today:

When Politicians Attack

There's a long, proud tradition of really negative campaigning in the final hours before a primary--anonymous flyers attacking the other candidates, that sort of thing. My sense is that every campaign does it (including my preferred candidate and Handsome Larry*, who's (accurately) perceived to have run the most positive campaign.) Every campaign is "shocked" at their rivals' dirty tricks and indignantly denies its own--until they're caught, in which case it's portrayed, truly or falsely, as a one-time mistake by an overzealous volunteer.

But there's negative campaigning, and there's negative campaigning. These had better be isolated incidents.

1. From an AP story:

For example, Carson said, an e-mail that proposes to be from campaign manager Joe Trippi asks for interns, but then says because of tight sleeping headquarters, homosexuals are not accepted.

Frances Gehling, a Dean volunteer, said she received a phone call January 16 from a person who identified herself as a Londonderry, N.H., resident who worked for the local Kerry campaign. After Gehling said she supported Dean, the caller asked if it bothered Gehling "that Dean waffles on the issues."

The caller then asked Gehling about Dean's statement that "we will learn how to talk about Jesus" when he campaigns in the South. "She asked how someone who is married to a Jew and raising Jewish children can have Christian values," Gehring said when contacted by The Associated Press.

2. There have been reports that people were calling voters in the middle of the night--4.a.m., say--in New Hampshire pretending to be from the Dean campaign. Atrios summarizes them here.

3. There were rumors on Kos of attacks on Dean's wife and other, even nastier push polls (would it change your opinion on Dean to know that he was an abortitionist, his history of spousal abuse, etc.) in Iowa, and a recording of a Kerry volunteer calling Dean an "environmental racist." I didn't take these very seriously at the time, but these reports have a cumulative effect.

If these reports are true (and I think most are, except maybe the rumors about the abortionist/spousal abuse push polls, which are not well sourced and so ridiculously sleazy that I find them hard to believe), and if they are an organized effort rather than a few wacko volunteers (which is much less clear) we still don't know who's responsible. It could be any Democratic candidate, or even a Republican trying to sow discord. My knee jerk reaction and that of many Dean supporters, though, was "it's probably the Kerry campaign." I'm sure that's partly sour grapes, but it's also partly Occam's razor. Most of the stories that are confirmed involve the Kerry campaign; Kerry participated in both Iowa and NH; and he was the one most likely to gain if Dean was damaged.

In any case, it needs to stop.

'Tolkienista'?

In the Small World category, Amygdala was nice enough to link to something that my Person To Contact In Case of Emergency wrote (and I later linked to here).

It got a good number of hits in the last week, and she never figured out why. Just one of those things, I guess.

my primary observations

1) Every campaign office I've ever been to looks almost exactly the same: industrial grey carpet, folding chairs, cheap cafeteria style tables, cardboard boxes of flyers, bumperstickers and other paraphernalia, mismatched phones, bathroom fixtures not quite securely bolted into the wall, random assortment of junk food....

2) Portsmouth's pizza situation has improved greatly since the days when my family would stop there between Bangor and Long Island.

3) 20 degrees sounds warm in comparison to 5 degrees, until you're outside in it for much of the day. And I spent a lot of time waiting in the car while my fellow volunteers were trudging through the snow to ring supporters' doorbells.

4) Getting out the vote is incredibly labor intensive. I think there's some room for innovation here-- someone needs to figure out the equivalent of Dean's strategy of using house meetings instead of canvassing to get lists of supporters.

5) 26% was on the optimistic side of my realistic expectations, but I thought Clark and Edwards might take more votes away from Kerry....

6) because he's so ^&%$^& boring!!! Okay, I am not noted for my objectivity, but that speech, oy. A collection of soundbites without any structure or power. Come on, Democrats, I don't expect everyone to support Dean, but is that really the best we can do?

7) Dean's speech, on the other hand, made me very proud indeed to be working for this campaign. I didn't get to see it live--they couldn't find a big enough venue for everyone, and in-state volunteers and overnighters got priority over folks who drove up for the day. I just watched it on C-Span. though, and it's the best speech I've seen him deliver in a long while. Perhaps ever, since I read rather than saw the speeches I liked so much early on. He's getting better at this--learning to speak with conviction and some passion without getting carried away.

8) It may be too late, of course. But damn it, it's good to care more about real, living politicians than the ones on the West Wing or your history books. It's good whether they win or not. (if at times a little embarrassing....I realized this while driving up I-95, when a song came on the radio that I'd last heard on a West Wing episode from sometime back when it was still good--season 2, I think. It made me realize that at that time I was much more attached to Jed Bartlet and friends than any real politician, and how much that's changed--first with Wellstone (but only after his death), then with Dean.)

9) Predictions? Schmredictions.

10) This was a good day, though I'm sort of sad right now--I don't think we're going to win, but there's nothing to be done about it except keep on keeping on and hope the Joementum shifts back in our favor.

11) I need to get some sleep.

update: but first I need to send you to this recap of the candidates' speeches.

WHEN PUNDITS ATTACK!!!!!

This is like, freaky. First Al Franken went head to head with a LaRouche supporter; now Bob Novak is shoving around hecklers. Where will the madness end? Are those wild rumors of a crossover between Network and Rollerball being greenlighted actually true? Will pundits restart the Code Duello, and if so, can we watch and hum the Star Trek (Original Series) Fight Scene music? Enquiring minds want to know.

(Via Blah 3 com, NGD and Wonkette, who also gets a blogroll link. Of course, this means that I can never hope for a link to The Rittenhouse Review. To that, I can only say: Promise?)