MoveOn’s ad attacking Donald Rumsfeld is not entirely fair. Rumsfeld never said that the threat from Iraq was imminent, or immediate, but that he could not know for sure. Nevertheless, this ad strikes me as a strong one, because it taps into general public skepticism about the honesty of their governments. That skepticism is a healthy instinct in a democracy, and it has, alas, been given new force by the WMD intelligence errors and the inability of the administration to face up to them squarely. Exactly that kind of skepticism played some role in the Spanish vote, and it accounts for some of the British hostility to Blair. If I were Kerry, I’d respond to the devastating Bush ads exposing his ability to say everything at once with a few focused ads on Bush’s history of inaccuracies. I’d start with replaying large sections of the Meet the Press interview.
PORTRAITS OF GRIEF: Iberiannotes blog has a few sketches of some of the victims of the Jihadist massacre in Madrid. We too easily forget the victims. Here are a few.
SOAP FROM STARBUCKS: I think this is not a spoof. But I may be wrong.
STU TAYLOR ON FFC: An interesting piece by Stuart Taylor on marriage and the Full Faith and Credit Clause. I’m less worried than he is about the U.S. Supreme Court intervening any time soon. But his piece is revealing because it shows that even if you do believe that the judiciary is going to impose civil marriage rights for gays, the Musgrave amendment is still not the way to go. In Taylor’s words:
By no stretch of the imagination, however, is the proposed amendment behind which Bush has placed his prestige an appropriate way to protect representative government. Quite the contrary. The first clause of the so-called Musgrave amendment (sponsored by Rep. Marilyn Musgrave, R-Colo.) would impose a uniform federal definition of marriage upon the whole country: “Marriage in the United States shall consist only of the union of a man and a woman.” This amounts to an anti-democratic, anti-federalist effort to ban all state legislatures, for all time, from experimenting with gay marriage — even if and when most voters in most states come to support gays’ right to wed. And public opinion appears to be headed in that direction: Although polls still show voters opposing gay marriage by a ratio of about 2-to-1, the numbers appear to be softening over time. Especially significant is that young voters are far more open to gay marriage than old ones.
In this sense, the president’s position on gay marriage has something in common with that of the Massachusetts court: Neither is willing to defer to democratic governance. While the court has imposed its definition of marriage on today’s voters, Bush seeks to impose his own definition on their children and grandchildren.
The Dish 