Category: Old Dish

The Republicans are at it again in Michigan. And Florida too. Ugh.

Glenn Reynolds seems to think that my criticism of the Iraq war is purely negative criticism. He cites my previous writing back in May that

There are also many valid criticisms of the occupation. But I have yet to read any cogent criticism that offers any better future plan than the one president Bush outlined Monday night. John Kerry’s plaintive cries to “internationalize” the transition are so vacuous they barely merit attention. The transition is already being run by the U.N.; very few countries have the military capacity to cooperate fully with the coalition, and few want to; quicker elections would be great, but very difficult to pull off on a national level before the end of the year. So what are Bush’s opponents proposing? More troops now? But wouldn’t that undercut the message of transferring sovereignty to the Iraqis? A sudden exit of all troops? But no one – apart from right-wing and leftwing extremists – thinks that’s a wise move. Giving a future Iraqi government a veto power over troop activities? Done, according to Blair. The truth is: Bush’s plan is about as good as we’re likely to get. And deposing a dictator after decades of brutal rule could never have led immediately to insta-democracy. . . .
What I’m saying, I guess, is that as long as the anti-war critics continue relentless negativism without any constructive alternative, they will soon lose the debate. Americans want to know how to move this war forward, not why we shouldn’t have started it in the first place. Right now, the president has the best plan for making this work. What does anyone else have?

Well, yes. I stand by every word. But things have moved on since then, haven’t they? The plan I outlined is now Kerry’s plan as well. (In fact, it’s closer to Kerry’s original plan than Bush’s.) And the insurgency has gained more traction and more manpower since May. And when we are facing an electoral decision six months later, criticism is anything but negative. My constructive point is that a new pro-war president will move things forward, and that the incumbent has proven himself incompetent. Time to hold someone accountable, I’d say. Glenn says he expected much worse. But did he expect no WMDs? Did he expect Colin Powell’s U.N. speech to be revealed as a tissue of untruths? Did he expect Abu Ghraib? Has Glenn ever fully come to terms with any of that? And the reason we all expected much worse from the invasion is that, in retrospect, we misread Saddam’s war-plan. He was far smarter than we were. We expected a brutal conventional battle. Saddam planned a strategic retreat and then an insurgent regrouping. And we were completely unprepared for it. The question is: why were we so unprepared? How were we out-foxed by a vicious old tyrant? And do we trust the same group of people to get it right this time? I don’t.

AS FOR MICKEY: It’s always pleasant to be dismissed as “excitable”. I do react to events instantly and with my emotions as well as my brain. And I reserve the right in blog-time to change my mind. But I have never been so excitable as to have argued last December that Kerry’s campaign was so execrably bad that he should withdraw from the race before the Iowa caucuses. Let’s roll the tape, shall we?

“Kerry Withdrawal Contest: In part for reasons described in the preceding item, Democratic Senator John Kerry, once proclaimed the frontrunner in the press, faces not just defeat but utter humiliation in the New Hampshire primary. Is he really going to soldier on to finish in the single digits and get clobbered by both Howard Dean and Wesley Clark, if not one or more other candidates? Shouldn’t he save his pride (and possible national political future, if only as a VP candidate) by withdrawing from the race before this harsh popular verdict is rendered? … But what can Kerry say that isn’t even more humiliating than seeing it through?” “I realize my wife Teresa needs me more than my country needs me”? That won’t cut it. “I’ve decided to take time out to learn the Web so I can compete in future campaigns” and “I’m entering rehab at an undisclosed location to recover from my vicious Ibogaine habit. I make no excuses” are too trendy. … Let’s harness the power of the Web and help Kerry adviser/speechwriter Robert Shrum with the dirty job that lies ahead for him. A copy of John Glenn: A Memoir to the reader who submits the best cover excuse that will let Sen. Kerry drop out of the presidential race before the voting actually starts while preserving his viability within the system. … Void where prohibited…

Would it have been possible last December 5 to have written something a) that “excitable” or b) that wrong? “Not just defeat but utter humiliation.” Hysteric, heal thyself.

Here’s a super-duper meta-analysis from Princeton of all the recent state polls, including all the parameters of turn-out, undecideds, etc etc. So it ends up with a statistical likelihood, not a prediction. Worth checking out. I should also add that Slate’s poll, leaning toward Bush, has this caveat:

Here is the math that matters: If all the states in which the data lean discernibly to either candidate vote as the polls suggest, the election will come down to Florida and Ohio. If Bush takes both, he wins. If Kerry takes either, he wins. We assess the probability in each state independently, and we assume that neither state’s turnout affects the other’s. Since the odds in each of the two states are approximately 50-50, with a tiny edge to Bush, the combined probability of Kerry winning the election is about 70 to 75 percent.

Check in for more updates.

Here’s a simple set of pleas for tomorrow from yours truly. Think about splitting your ticket. If you vote Kerry for president, vote Republican for the Congress (unless there’s a big reason not to in a specific case) and vice-versa. Both Bush and Kerry will be better presidents with a hostile Congress. In the eight states where constitutional amendments are aimed at removing all protections from gay couples, do not fall for the idea that the measures are aimed at “protecting” marriage. If that were the case, the amendments would not be so sweeping. They are designed entirely to strip a group of citizens of equality under the law, to deter gay people from having settled relationships, and to keep homosexuality stigmatized. And please also consider voting for relaxation of marijuana laws that deny people the right to harmless pleasure and, in many cases, important medical relief. Montana, Oregon, Alaska, and Massachusetts have important measures to this effect. Vote for them.

Well, I see no Bush endorsement. As such. His wisest words are the following, it seems to me:

If I could choose the person whose attitude toward the immediate foe was nearest to mine, I would pick Bush (and Blair). But if I departed from the strictly subjective, and then considered the ways in which this administration has bitched things up, and further imagined what might happen to a Democratic incumbent who was compelled to get real, I could see a case the other way.

Those are my feelings entirely. And in a pinch, because of the established fact of regime change in the only two countries where we had a realistic chance of regime change, I think Kerry is now the better bet. Notice the word: now. The job now is nation-building, alliance-mending, and a more focused attack on al Qaeda. If I had any remaining confidence in the Bush administration’s competence and candor in these three areas, I’d still back Bush. But, sad to say, I don’t. And what persuaded me of this was Bush himself in the debates. He had nothing substantive to say about his record, no actual defense of his war decisions. His campaign was entirely about Kerry, and an appeal to abstract notions of toughness. That’s what you do when you can’t really defend yourself. One more thought from Hitch:

It’s absurd for liberals to talk as if Kristallnacht is impending with Bush, and it’s unwise and indecent for Republicans to equate Kerry with capitulation. There’s no one to whom he can surrender, is there? I think that the nature of the jihadist enemy will decide things in the end.

Amen. Yes, it’s indecent to believe that Kerry would “surrender” to Jihadists, as indecent as the attacks on his war record in Vietnam. We all have the same enemy: the Jihadists. And it is not a surrender to them to adjust tactics to ensure their better defeat.

MARRIAGE STATS: An email on the high rates of dovorce in the Bible Belt:

I teach statistics at North Georgia College & State University. Just wanted to weigh in on the fact that Bible Belt states have higher divorce rates. If you read the article, you find that the divorce statistic has no relationship to religious beliefs. The best statistical predictor of marriage “success” (non-divorce) is getting married the first time after age 25 – 28 (varies depending upon the study). In the South, people get married younger. There is no information on whether this has anything to do with religion. Finally, the other predictors mentioned in the article are socioeconomic status, level of education and Catholicity of the population. Again, religion (pro-Catholic) does influence the marriage success in a positive way.
In sum, there is no provable connection between increased divorce and religion. It would be just as statistically persuasive to say that the warmer climate in the South leads to higher promuscuity rates (and thus to more divorce) because more people are able to show more skin more often. To say being Baptist causes more divorce is taking a second-order correlation and claiming first-order causation. Statistically, that’s a reach. It may be true, but I don’t see anything in this article to back it up.

More feedback on the Letters Page.

Different poll of polls sites show Kerry edging ahead in the past couple of days. RealClearPolitics, the excellent right-of-center site, shows its narrowest lead for Bush yet, with Kerry at his highest point since the first debate, when he took off. Electoral-Vote.com shows a big Kerry win. (Slate shows a tiny tilt back toward Bush.) Fox shows a small Kerry lead nationally. All of these are so close they could go either way. But when one candidate seems to be gaining in the last day, that matters.

No, I don’t mean the election. I mean the attempt to retake Falluja. Allawi is giving clear signals that it could begin this week. Upon it hinges the future of Iraq. Yes, if you read Instapundit, you will believe that everything is going well, or at least well enough that worries are simply a function of ignorance or spin. And then you read this report in Newsweek:

the truth is, neither party is fully reckoning with the reality of Iraq – which is that the insurgents, by most accounts, are winning. Even Secretary of State Colin Powell, a former general who stays in touch with the Joint Chiefs, has acknowledged this privately to friends in recent weeks, Newsweek has learned. The insurgents have effectively created a reign of terror throughout the country, killing thousands, driving Iraqi elites and technocrats into exile and scaring foreigners out. “Things are getting really bad,” a senior Iraqi official in interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi’s government told Newsweek last week. “The initiative is in [the insurgents’] hands right now. This approach of being lenient and accommodating has really backfired. They see this as weakness.”…

Throughout much of Iraq, but especially in the Sunni Triangle at the heart of the country, U.S. troops are unable to control streets and highways, towns and cities. And allied Iraqi troops are simply not numerous, well trained or trustworthy enough. Attacks on Coalition and Iraqi forces are now in the range of 100 a day; casualties among Iraqis are far greater. More than 900 policemen have been killed in the past year, according to the Ministry of the Interior. The Iraqi media have been targeted, too: in just the past three weeks, assassins have killed two Iraqi journalists, both female TV personalities. On Saturday, a car bomb detonated near Al Arabiya TV in Baghdad, killing seven.

Most overseas attention has focused on the 160 or so foreigners who have been kidnapped, many of them representatives of Coalition countries. But militants and criminal gangs have also kidnapped thousands of Iraqis, most of them held for ransom. As a result, Iraqi elites are fleeing by the thousands, many to neighboring Jordan. “Iraq is there for the bandits now. Anyone with the financial ability to do so has left,” says Amer Farhan, who departed last summer with his father, Sadeq, a factory owner, and all of their family.

According to Glenn Reynolds, this is all an inevitable downside of an amazingly successful war-plan. Anyone worrying about the conduct of this war “hasn’t paid much attention to history, and warfare. Or they’re just posturing.” Let’s just pray that Glenn is right; and that almost every serious piece of reporting out of Iraq is completely off-base.

With traditional labels obsolete, this election throws our politics into a new ideological landscape. My take, now posted opposite.

COULD IT BE ANY CLOSER? Gallup finds a dead heat in its final poll:

Using voting behavior data from previous elections, the Gallup organization attempted to estimate how the undecideds would vote Tuesday. The result was a tie of 49 percent each for Bush and Kerry, with 1 percent for Nader and 1 percent for other candidates. In the history of polling, Gallup has never come out with a tied race in its final pre-election estimate — just one more footnote for the history books in a history-making campaign.

I hear all sorts of different things – how the Bush internals are looking good, how the Dem GOTV operation is on fire, etc etc. But I doubt anyone really knows how this will turn out. What’s clear is that this country is so far reluctant to give an incumbent war-president in a good economy a clear new mandate. I think I know why.

YOUNG, RESTLESS, KERRY VOTERS? A Zogby poll of twenty-something cell-phone users finds a big Kerry lead. Have these people been adequately factored in to the current polls? Who knows?

We all know which states have stronger marriages, don’t we? The ones so keen to “protect” marriage, right? Some data:

The Associated Press, using data supplied by the US Census Bureau, found that the highest divorce rates are to be found in the Bible Belt. The AP report stated that “the divorce rates in these conservative states are roughly 50 percent above the national average of 4.2 per thousand people.” The 10 Southern states with some of the highest divorce rates were Alabama, Arkansas, Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and Texas. By comparison nine states in the Northeast were among those with the lowest divorce rates: Connecticut, Massachusetts, Maine, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and Vermont.

Actually, I do think that one reason the anti-marriage forces in the South are so strong, when it comes to gay couples, is due to classic scapegoating. How much more comforting to believe that the problems of marriage lie with a distant “other” than in the heart of your own neighborhood and culture.

DERBYSHIRE AWARD NOMINEE: “I’m happy to see some of the Church leadership taking a leadership role on this issue. Separation of church from state does not mean separation of state from church. If people of faith (not simply Catholics, but all people of faith) were to let their faith guide their civic duty, this election would be a landslide.” – Shannen Coffin, National Review Online. I think that’s a pretty transparent assertion that God – everyone’s God – wants the Republican to win. But, hey, there are no theocratic tendencies at National Review, are there?

Yes, someone can and should.

QUOTE OF THE DAY: “The race is enjoined fully. Each man has consolidated his own base. Bush has good leads in the Red States, among investors, and among Republicans, Born Again Christians, Men, and married voters. He is right where he needs to be.” – John Zogby, commenting on his poll showing a race deadlocked 48 – 48 nationally.

EMAIL OF THE DAY: “I am sitting here crying after reading your endorsement of Kerry. I have been a faithful reader for a long time. No longer will I have you on my ‘Favorites.’ I am a 65 year old white, straight female with 4 children, 14 grandchildren and 2 great grandchildren. I have told so many of them about you and how much I admired you. That changes now…..I don’t have the eloquence or the skill with words that you do and I am so sorry that I can no longer respect your opinion.” Don’t miss a swathe of responses to the endorsement on the Letters Page.