Category: Old Dish

In retrospect, I made three basic miscalculations in favoring the war to depose Saddam three years ago. I thought Saddam had stockpiles of WMDs the discovery of which would bolster support for the war after liberation; I believed we would have enough troops to keep the peace; and I thought the massive reconstruction funds would buy popular support for the occupation. Wrong on all three counts. Here’s a story from the NYT today on the reconstruction of Najaf. Najaf is remarkably free from major violence, and yet the reconstruction is still a shambles, hobbled by poor oversight, corruption, delays, translation problems and general incompetence. Anyone who knows contractors of any kind knows some of this is part of the process. But you just have to read this story to see how widespread this mess is. Again: issue one for the Bush administration is government competence. They don’t seem to have much. And in the end, with even the best policy in the world, competence matters. Iraq is particularly apposite here, because if there was ever a case in which we knew we had to get it right, this was it. And yet, they seem never at a loss for excuses for failure. Discouraging doesn’t quite capture the essence of this. Maddening is more like it.

BLAIR AND THE BEEB: He gets it.

Hey, a new award, and this time a nice one. It’s an award for bloggers – or anyone else for the matter – who are prepared to alienate their core readership with some unpleasant truths. Matt Yglesias wins the first one and gets the eternal glory and fame that comes with a mention on this blog. His winning item:

I think I should point out that despite the large role the DHS bait-and-switch and the outrageous treatment of Max Cleland now plays in liberal mythology, Democrats should keep in mind that that was ultimately a debacle of their own making. The entire DHS concept was cooked up initially as a Democratic Party political ploy and never made a huge amount of sense.

Good stuff. Keep the honesty coming. If you see a right- or left-wing writer fessing up to their own side’s errors or mistakes, let me know. We need more of it.

Where’s the love? I actually have some vague memory of Mike Kinsley, when he was my (inspirational) boss at The New Republic, having a single key on his keyboard that would convert all semi-colons into a period, followed by a capital letter.

WALTER ON BLOGGING: I missed this but Walter Kirn wrote a short piece for Time on his experience as a novice blogger on this site last month. It’s a hoot. Money quote:

I didn’t eat that day and barely stood up. The following morning I read through what I’d written but I couldn’t remember writing it. Nor, upon deep reflection, did I agree with it. But who had time for deep reflection? I hadn’t blogged yet and it was 7 a.m., which meant that the commuters two time zones east of me had reached their offices already and were about to go online. The rotation of the earth and the rhythmic movements of the masses didn’t matter when I wrote for magazines, but I was working at the speed of light now, even if I wasn’t thinking at it. Knowing that an empty website would prompt a hundred nasty e-mails, I blazed through a blog entry about the state of journalism, repeating arguments that I’d made at dinner parties and illustrating them with stories that I’d rehearsed in barrooms. I finished the piece in twenty minutes, a record, and twenty minutes later, via e-mail, a producer from C-SPAN asked me if I’d be free to talk about it on the air that Friday.

Yep, that’s pretty much how it is. Then do it most days for five years and … I have to take a nap now.

“You really hit the nail on the head for me when you talked about not watching Bush’s speech because you’re just sick of him. That’s how I feel too – I can’t believe we have to live with this guy as president for another 3 years and four months. This presidency has become like “In a Gadda Da Vida” – it goes on and on and on, and yet goes nowhere. I haven’t stopped being a Republican, I’ve just stopped being one who supports Bush. But just to be fair, I think he faces one serious political obstacle to deficit reduction that true conservatives aren’t acknowledging: if Bush tried to cut spending anyplace in government, do you think for one minute that Democrats, or their water-carriers in the media, would do anything other than portray him as a vicious monster desperate to throw the poor and the old into the streets? In fact, Bush’s response to Katrina last night – spend lots of money – is the natural Rovian response to the shellacking he’s taken for heartlessly letting so many suffer in New Orleans.

Yes, Bush is a clown. But I’m afraid the real death of conservatism occurred when Newt Gingrich overplayed his hand in the budget showdown with Clinton in 1995, thus making politicians terrified of ever again trying to reduce spending on any government program. You want to blame someone for our bloated deficit, Andrew? Blame us all, because as a country we are not willing to accept that we cannot spend any amount of money we want on government programs.”

Democratic donkeys (real ones) in Afghanistan.

Finally, someone with backbone.

Some more details on what might be done. Right now, we have a not-too-great experimental vaccine and insufficient supplies of Tamiflu to try and limit the viral impact if you get infected. But there are other options. A specialist emailed me to point out the following:

Tamiflu is mentioned because it’s the only drug that works against both influenza A and influenza B strains. However, pandemic influenza is type A and the current “bird flu” H5N1 is also type A. For this we have two other drugs which are approved for treating type A infleunza – amantadine and rimandatine. Both are available as generic and are much cheaper/ should be easier to get.

Where are the feds on that one? Amantadine will not help avian flu as it now is – but a single new mutation could make the flu vulnerable to it; and it cannot hurt to have big supplies of it ready to go. Small things can cause big shifts in an epidemic’s reach. The Canadian government has stockpiled a big supply – which may save many lives in the early days of a pandemic. So have many other countries. Other possible drugs – to ward off flu in the uninfected and weaken it in the infected – include oseltamivir and zanamivir (the side-effects suck). According to this article, “The United States is doing nothing to assure an adequate supply of these drugs.” Given what we know of the Bush administration’s competence, why am I not surprised? At my next doctor’s visit, I’m going to request my own supply of all these drugs, just in case. You might think about it as well. In a national emergency in the U.S. under Bush, you’re on your own. Next time, we shouldn’t be shocked by federal ineptitude. We should just prepare to save ourselves.

My analogy seems to have hit a nerve. Powerline provides ten reasons Hewitt isn’t as slavishly pro-Bush as Blumenthal was slavishly pro-Clinton. One is that Sid was on the Clinton pay-roll. But Hewitt doesn’t need to be on the Bush pay-roll. He does it for free. He’d pay to do it. Which was roughly Sid’s mojo when he was a journalist as well. I know. I edited him. Sid worships the Democratic party, regardless of what it does; Hewitt’s own site once boasted as its guiding principle that the “Power of the Democrats Must Be Destroyed.” Hard to get more nakedly partisan than that. Then there’s this: “Hugh has a massive nationwide U.S. audience (sort of like Sullivan once did).” Hewitt’s radio show does indeed have a big audience and so does his blog. Good for him. But according to this blog traffic list, Hugh’s site gets around 44,000 visits a day and this blog – despite my attempt to piss off every conservative reader I’ve ever had – still gets 54,000. Add in my Time column – the biggest news magazine in the U.S. – and my Sunday Times column – the biggest Sunday circulation in the UK – and I’m not sure how Powerline believes that I have fewer readers than Hewitt has readers and listeners. But, hey, Powerline believes that the Iraq war has been conducted flawlessly and that the feds did a perfect job with Katrina. I should add one thing: I like both Sid and Hugh. I’ve never met Hewitt, but our interactions have always been civil and he seems like a perfect gentleman, as crazed ideologues go. But I don’t think even he would deny that he is one of the last true believers in the administration. Rove would abandon the ship before Hugh would. As with Sid, it’s admirable in a strange kind of way.

Accountability meets the NYT op-ed page. Money quote:

All Mr. Krugman has offered so far is a faux correction. Each Op-Ed columnist has a page in nytimes.com that includes his or her past columns and biographical information. Mr. Krugman has been allowed to post a note on his page that acknowledges his initial error, but doesn’t explain that his initial correction of that error was also wrong. Since it hasn’t been officially published, that posting doesn’t cause the correction to be appended to any of the relevant columns.
If the problem is that Mr. Krugman doesn’t want to give up precious space in his column for a correction, there are alternatives. Perhaps some space could be found elsewhere on the Op-Ed page so that readers-especially those using electronic versions of his pieces — could get the accurate information they deserve.
A bottom-line question: Does a corrections policy not enforced damage The Times’s credibility more than having no policy at all?

Bottom-line answer: yes.

“You ought to give President Bush some slack. He has had to face more in his presidency than arguably any other in the last 100 years. He inherited a recession, 9/11 happened, the Iraq war and this hurricane. He is only human and I think he is doing better than most.
I don’t like the big spending nor the illegal immigration crisis. But I do believe the President is a man of integrity facing outstanding and overwhelming problems in his office.”