Stop Me Before I Vote Again

" Suddenly, Democrats see a possibility in 2006 [for] a sweeping midterm election"

A return to Democratic control of Congress? Yup, that's the dream. And not just a half-ass set-up, not just a new razor's edge Senate; no madame no, there's to be a House takeover too, "an anti-incumbent, 1994-style" tsunami.

Dream on.

The donkey won't see such good times till Hillary is burnt at the stake. And if you don't believe me, here's the gray lady's squint :

"New polling .... shows the approval rating for Congressional Republican leaders at 32 percent with 52 percent disapproving, a sharp deterioration .... "

Sounds good, right? Well, guess what:

"The ratings of Democratic leaders stood at 32 percent approval, 48 percent disapproval."

I.e. 32 versus 32 approving, 52 vs 48 disapproving -- where's the hee-haw in that? To think this ridiculous less-than-a-dime's-worth of difference is the stuff donkey dreams are made of.

Ah, but there's more hope on the horizon:

"48 percent say they want a Democratic-led Congress compared to 39 percent who prefer Republican control."

Any well-funded bunch of corporate PR types can drown that lead in Grover Norquist's bathtub, surely? But let's move on.

So what if the Republicans are "swimming in a culture of cronyism and corruption"? Is that enough to get it done? Or do the D's need (as the Times suggests) their own "Contract With America"? And if so -- just what are the "broad themes" to be ?

Well, the Times obligingly revels a top secret Demo poop sheet. The bullet points:

"energy independence"
"broader access to health care and college education"
"government reform"
"economic security"
and
[insert trumpet fanfare here]
"Iraq and national security."

Now naturally that last theme is the jazzerciser, right ? -- since all the others are as venerably stale and eminently defeatable as they were back in the 94 98 and 02 platforms.

So -- how about that Iraq thing? Will it be -- go for it -- a cry of "out of Iraq ...now"?

Well, the Times isn't coming flat out of the closet on this -- probably because there's no closet to come out of. They write: "Iraq is the most divisive issue for the Democrats." I'll translate for ya: Peace now on the Euphrates ... Not gonna happen.

"America Can Do Better."

Well. Yes. Indeed she can.

My hometown paper, though, is not giving it much play. Here's today's spin, buried inconspicuously in the International>Europe section of the online Gray Lady -- the work of the ineffable Craig S. Smith, no relation of mine, I'm glad to say:

Facing crippling strikes and growing civil unrest, Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin of France on Tuesday discussed watering down his contentious new labor law with legislators...

"The prime minister was very closed last week, but was more open to the idea of amending the law today," said Éric Woerth, a party legislator who attended the meeting. "Almost everyone agrees that we must do something, not because of the mobilization of the unions, but because the battle of explaining the law has been lost with the young."

Any significant weakening of the law will represent a serious blow to the prime minister, who hopes to run for president next year. It will also signal another defeat in France's long struggle to break the stranglehold of its rigid social-welfare system, which economists say has kept growth sluggish and unemployment high for decades. While there is no guarantee that the new law will create jobs, as the government contends, bowing to student and union pressure on it will call into question the current administration's ability to restructure the system.

France has a strong tradition of often violent demonstrations and paralyzing strikes that is largely tolerated by the broader population, which has a cultural mistrust of government even as it retains a deep sense of dependency on the state. The resulting tendency to rebel against any attempt to curtail entitlements has cowed many administrations into backing down from bold policies that might have helped remake the system in the past.

Why has the US been willing to set aside its own security and that of many of its allies in order to advance the interests of another state? One might assume that the bond between the two countries was based on shared strategic interests or compelling moral imperatives, but neither explanation can account for the remarkable level of material and diplomatic support that the US provides.

Instead, the thrust of US policy in the region derives almost entirely from domestic politics, and especially the activities of the ‘Israel Lobby’. Other special-interest groups have managed to skew foreign policy, but no lobby has managed to divert it as far from what the national interest would suggest....

The Israel lobby... wants America to help Israel remain the dominant regional power. The Israeli government and pro-Israel groups in the United States have worked together to shape the administration’s policy towards Iraq, Syria and Iran, as well as its grand scheme for reordering the Middle East.

Pressure from Israel and the Lobby was not the only factor behind the decision to attack Iraq in March 2003, but it was critical. Some Americans believe that this was a war for oil, but there is hardly any direct evidence to support this claim. Instead, the war was motivated in good part by a desire to make Israel more secure.

Is this a straw in the wind? Are significant sectors of elite opinion starting to get tired of being joined at the hip to an embarrassment like Israel? I'd love to think so.

I've often scratched my head trying to account for the irrationality of the Empire's policy in regard to Israel -- it doesn't do anything for us, at least since the end of the Cold War if not longer, and in fact it's a net liability. How can the managers of the Empire allow this to happen?

The best explanation I could come up with was that imperial management doesn't optimize, it seeks only to perpetuate and expand. That is, imperial management will react very rationally to anything that's a threat or even a serious obstacle to its purposes, but if some clique or cabal within the loosely organized camarilla of dominant interests has a pet project, they will be allowed to indulge it as long as it doesn't threaten to disrupt business in any important way.

I figure that Israel falls into this category -- as if the Soprano family were to indulge some cousin in a peculiar and perhaps even illegal sexual kink, as long as it didn't start to pose a problem to the family generally.

But in the Israel case, I strongly suspect that some elite elements are starting to worry that Cousin Kinko may be a little off the reservation, drawing too much attention from the cops, pissing off the neighbors unnecessarily.

The Lobby and its outriders have reacted with predictable fury -- Alan Dershowitz, having found a platform perfectly suited to him in The New York Sun, is running in circles, frothing at the mouth and snapping at his own tail; Max Boot, in the LA Times, amusingly exhumes Richard Hofstadter. My congressman, Jerrold Nadler, bestirred his blubbery bulk to accuse Mearsheimer and Walt of finding “Jewish conspirators under every bed and controlling every major American institution”. Best of all, perhaps, is Mad Marty Peretz at the New Republic, who writes, "Support for Israel is, deep down, an expression of America's best view of itself," and goes on to suggest that Martin Indyk isn't pro-Israel enough.

Interestingly MIA in this donnybrook is everybody's Aunt Sadie on 43d Street, The New York Times, which as far as I can tell has published not one word on this story. I've always said the Times is more interesting when it doesn't write than when it does, and surely this studied silence is intensely interesting. I don't know quite what to make of it, actually, but it'll be fun to see how long they can keep it up, and what mouse the mountain will bring forth at last.

Condi has good things to say about Brahms -- "passionate without being sentimental" -- and even more to her credit, her piano is a nice mellow old Chickering, rather than what would be, in New York, the inevitable brazen-throated Steinway. To paraphrase Nabokov, you can always count on a murderer to have a sensitive ear.

But at least she plays, and apparently puts a lot of herself into it. Nixon used to play the piano -- though he couldn't read music and had to figure out everything by ear. Also, he could only play in the key of G; I don't know what to make of that.

Do any prominent Democrats do music? There's Clinton and his saxophone. Maybe that says it all.

The Times' obit was entertainingly filled with the usual folie de grandeur -- Abe is described as

... a demanding editor who lifted The New York Times from economic doldrums in the 1970s and molded it into a journalistic juggernaut known for distinguished reporting of national and world affairs....

Rosenthal, known as Abe, spent virtually all of his working life at the Times, beginning as a lowly campus stringer in 1943. He rose to police reporter, foreign correspondent, managing editor and finally to the exalted office of executive editor, a post he held for nine years beginning in 1977.

''Abe was a giant among journalists,'' retired Times publisher Arthur Ochs Sulzberger said in a statement. ''He was a great editor with extraordinary loyalty to his troops.''

A fragment from my reading notes.... on a Henry Wallace bio:

We oughta find the hell out where they got that self-important flea Walter Lippmann buried. Go dig the guy up, and then we oughta periodically force one of these long-toed liberal elitist muscular-secularity types to make love to his dried remains -- Aztec style in June, and Eskimo style in mid-January.

CBS REPORTER FLOWN TO GERMANY. DOCTORS SAY SHE IS "RESPONSIVE"

Mini-pundit Adam Cohen seems to fear a plebroots riot of unsynchronized digital brawling and other Jacksonian hoi-polloi misbehavior:

More input from the "net roots" -- the Internet version of grass roots -- may help the Democratic leadership avoid some bad decisions. But it may also make Democratic politics even more scattershot compared with the well-oiled Republican machine.

It's all over the map already: the New York Times has endorsed Lamont over that nutmeg muppet of Fort Zion, das Lieber-fiend.

Why, why, why? This can't be good. The Times, choosing just this moment to stab the pre-eminent acolyte of Mini-Me in the back?

There's a fair foulness in the air, dear hearts.

Condi Rice's apparent success, a day or two ago, in putting the lid on Israel's Guernica-Part-Deux in Lebanon had the Monolithic Empire lefties congratulating themselves on their penetration. But of course here's the latest:

As Israel fought more aggressively on the ground, it continued to keep down its number of airstrikes in the second day of a 48-hour pause in the air campaign it promised the American Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice.

Israel said that it would halt air operations for two days while it investigates the deaths of dozens of civilians in Qana, but said it would make exceptions to respond to "imminent threats," like rocket-launching teams, and to support ground forces.

Ms. Rice said she had accepted Israel’s explanation for resuming airstrikes barely 12 hours after the suspension was announced.

"I accept the universe" is reported to have been a favorite utterance of our New England transcendentalist, Margaret Fuller; and when some one repeated this phrase to Thomas Carlyle, his sardonic comment is said to have been: "Gad! she'd better!"

Every so often a contraband copy of the New York Times will be left lying around, like a basking copperhead, on my kitchen table, and my bleary morning eye will land upon it before I've had enough coffee to realize the danger. Once I start reading, of course, it's too late.

I got bit this way a few days ago by a review, from the busy pen of Michigan Kakufoni, or whatever her name is, that Carlos the Jackal among book-assassins. Michigan was dealing very severely with the ludicrous Dinesh D'Souza. "Willfully incendiary... preposterous... embarrassing," she called Dinesh's latest flight of fancy, The Enemy At Home, a "partisan screed... of illogical arguments, distorted and cherry-picked information, ridiculous generalizations and nutty asides." This from a woman who, the week before, treated "Chucky" Schumer's partisan screed with the greatest deference, though all the strictures just quoted might be applied with equal justice to it.

Michigan and her editors gave the clownish D'Souza thirty column inches of detailed refutation, plus a rather endearing author photo, credited to one Dixie D'Souza -- sounds like a Carl Hiaasen heroine, doesn't it? -- that makes jug-earned Dinesh look like Rowan Atkinson in the role of Mr Bean.

What cries out for explanation here is why the Times would pay so much attention to such a silly book. Evidently, even though Dinesh is a raving loony, he's still enough of a somebody to merit attention, and his ideas, crazy as they are, must be taken seriously enough to argue with.

Michigan's lede establishes Dinesh's credentials as "the Rishwain research scholar at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University" -- honest, she put that whole jawbreaker into her first sentence. And she allows as how John Philip D'Souza's 1991 Illiberal Education "did have some illuminating points... about the excesses of political correctness on college campuses." But now, she says, the former illuminator has turned himself into "the Ann Coulter of the think-tank set," and, most damning of all, he has written a book that is -- brace yourself -- "irresponsible."

Dinesh, I think, has constituted himself, in Michigan's eyes, as something like a rogue cop. While he was plying his nightstick against the vagaries of the campus left, such as it is, he had a useful, if modest, MP's berth in the American ideological fleet -- whose flagship is the mighty dreadnought wherein Michigan herself sails the seas of thought. But now Dinesh has gone for a buccaneer, popgunning at "mainstream politicians like Hillary Clinton, Robert Byrd and Jimmy Carter," at Garry Wills and Seymour Hersh, and at -- oho! -- "several New York Times columnists."

It's amazing, really, how many levels of gatekeepers we seem to need. Those must be some very vulnerable gates. Let's not even mention the educational gatekeepers; but even after you've squeaked through the sheepskin gate, like Giles Goat-Boy, there are agents, and editors, and publishers, all of whom have the thumb down by default. And if you get through that crowd -- if, for example, Bill Buckley is taken with your dusky, sloe-eyed, moon-faced charm -- you still have to deal with the Millikan Cacafuegoes.

Of course, the Mulligans are a comparatively small peril after all your other adventures. It's as if Odysseus should pass through Scylla and Charybdis and storm and shipwreck and finally crawl ashore to confront the fangs of a really angry miniature poodle, yapping on and on through thirty column inches of who-cares prose.

I don't suppose McGillicuddy will have much effect on Dinesh's bottom line -- in fact, her carpet-chewing will probably stand him in good stead among his reference group. Come to think of it, I greatly envy old Dinesh. If only I could make Miching Millecho that angry!

On the other hand -- if I'd have to cozy up to Bill Buckley to get there -- well, I'd consider it. But surely, surely! there's another way?

Resume of Doom
By MAUREEN DOWD

Paul Wolfowitz may be out of a job soon, but think of what an amazing resume he'll be shopping around:

Work Experience

President of World Bank: 2005-2007

Achievements: Paralyzed the international lending apparatus...

Deputy Secretary of Defense for President George W. Bush: 2001-2005

Achievements: ... Shattered the system of international diplomacy that kept the peace for 50 years. Undermined the credibility of American intelligence operations. Needlessly brought humankind to the brink of nuclear war. Destroyed Iraq.

On her planet, it would also seem that the last fifty years have been peaceful ones. There is a country on her planet called the United States which until recently had "credible" intelligence operations, and another country called Iraq that was not well into the process of destruction under the current President's predecessors.

I don't know whether I would like to live on the planet Maureenia or not. Perhaps not, in spite of its peacefulness and the benignity of its institutions; those institutions seem to loom awfully large there.

I do, however, rather wish Maureen would hop in her spacecraft and return home.

Here's cherubic little Andrew Rosenthal on the subject:

http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003690036

Times' editorial page editor Andy Rosenthal defended the move. Rosenthal told Politico.com shortly after the official announcement Saturday that he fails to understand “this weird fear of opposing views....We have views on our op-ed page that are as hawkish or more so than Bill....

“The idea that The New York Times is giving voice to a guy who is a serious, respected conservative intellectual — and somehow that’s a bad thing,” Rosenthal added. “How intolerant is that?”

The Times is a funny outfit. The Limbaughs et al. are quite right to characterize it as a "liberal" publication, and it is that, to the marrow of its bones. Yet it has a noticeable openness to thoroughly crazy right-wing teppichfressers and their crazy ideas. Kristol on the Op-Ed page is just another chapter in the picaresque story that includes such shining moments as Judith Miller on Iraqi WMD.

I say "yet," but in fact there's no "yet" about it. The nature of liberalism is to split the difference. If you're little Pinch Sulzberger, or little Andy Rosenthal, and the spectrum of opinion you hear at Manhattan parties from loud, overbearing, well-respected, legend-in-their-own-time Sir Oracles ranges from insane to really insane, naturally you will conclude that the truth lies somewhere in between.

Reflect that the Times sits on the commanding heights of ideological formation for the American postgraduate class; imagine how hard the Kristols and their ilk work to get a foot in the door. Pinch and Andy must have these purple-faced spit-spraying loons lined up outside their offices, all the way to the elevator. I bet they can't go anywhere without being buttonholed by some Likudnik mad dog baying at the moon about how hard it is to get their "voices" heard.

So I can't really blame Pinch and Andy. And if it helps discredit the Times, well then, my hat's off to Bill Kristol.

On a more personal note, it's pure pleasure to see the son of Irving Kristol get a job from the son of Abe Rosenthal. It's very Old Testament -- The sins of the fathers are visited upon the sons.

The actual Interpol report, a monstrous indigestible bolus of bureaucratic memo-graphy, contains, when you boil it down, two consequential statements:

1) "Interpol said its forensic experts had found no signs that Colombia had altered files" on the seized equipment;

2) "Interpol’s experts verified that the [Colombian military's handling of the equipment] had not altered the content of the archives."

The first of these statements can legitimately be made and supported by a computer-forensic investigation; the second cannot. Tampering with data on a computer disk or "thumb drive" may leave traces, and if so a competent forensic investigation will find them. But it is also possible, even for a person of modest technical skill, to tamper with such devices in a way that leaves no trace at all. (I make part of my modest living doing this stuff, so I know.)

Interpol's confident -- and unjustifiable -- claim to know definitely that the Colombian military "had not altered" the data appears to be a case of telling the customer what he wants to hear.

Neither the Times nor any other media organization appears to have asked any independent expert for an assessment of what Interpol said. Surprise, surprise.

Hugo Chavez' characterization of Interpol chief Ronald Noble as a "gringo policeman" and a "clown" is, as usual for Chavez, right on target.

Noble is a Clinton protege, though he made his earlier Justice Department career in the previous two administrations. He has a long history of, shall we say, political sensitivity. My favorite example:

In 2003, Noble sounded a warning about fake consumer goods after an Interpol investigation linked them to shadowy political organizations such as Al Qaeda. He called the illegal trade in counterfeit designer wear such as shoes and purses "the preferred method of funding for a number of terrorist groups," according to an International Herald Tribune article by David Johnston.

My response: Tim who?

I may be the only person in North America who doesn't know who Tim Russert is, or was. Judging by the unanimous outpouring of grief at his passing, I feel entitled to consider this fact a mark of some distinction. Conventional wisdom is always wrong -- in fact, conventional wisdom is always diametrically wrong.

Or no, that's a little too sweeping. A stopped clock is right twice a day. Better to say that betting against conventional wisdom is always a good idea. You may not win quite so often, but you feel very elated when you do. One time pays for all.

The reason for my ignorance about the newly-sainted Russert is not far to seek: I don't watch TV much anymore. Particularly TV news. Last time I watched "Meet The Press" was maybe 1972. Okay, 1973. Early 1973.

Here's some elegiac dribble on the late Tim:

Tim Russert, a political lifer who made a TV career of his passion with unrelenting questioning of the powerful and influential, died suddenly Friday.... Praise poured in from the biggest names in politics....

NBC interrupted its regular programming with news of Russert's death and continued for several hours of coverage without commercial break....

Familiar NBC faces... took turns mourning his loss....

"I can say from experience that joining Tim on "Meet the Press" was one of the greatest tests any public official could face," said Rep. John Boehner....

Russert was also a senior vice president at NBC, and this year Time magazine named him one of the 100 most influential people in the world.

He had ... a Democratic pedigree that came from his turn as an aide to the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York.

Lawmakers from both parties lined up to sing his praises after his sudden death.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said [dribble]...

[Dribble], Sen. Barack Obama, the Democratic presidential contender, told reporters...

Republican Sen. John McCain of Arizona, Obama's rival for the White House, hailed Russert as [dribble]...

[Russert] won an Emmy for his role in the coverage of President Ronald Reagan's funeral in 2004.

Oh, I'm sure his wife and kids didn't think so -- well, no, on reflection, let's leave the wife out of it; any wife who doesn't think her husband is a creep has got a screw loose. But the kids loved him. Probably. So let's give him and the kids the benefit of the doubt and shed a tear on their behalf.

Now back to our regularly-scheduled programming.

Everybody seems to have loved this supposedly tough guy. So... one wonders how tough he really was.

For me, the Moynihan connection would be enough to cast the guy into outer darkness -- even without the emmy-winning reportage on The Mummy's funeral. Retch.