I’ve updated my Iraq-Vietnam comparison graphs with the number of US dead for July, 2004. The number was up from the previous month, with 54 US fatalities.

Again, I’m getting these figures from the advanced search tool at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund site, and from Lunaville’s page on Iraq coalition casualties. The figures are for the number of US dead per month, without regard to whether the deaths were combat-related.

The first graph shows the first seventeen months of each war. (Click on any image for a larger version.)

Next, the same chart, with the Vietnam numbers extended out to cover the first four years of the war:

Finally, the chart that gives the US death toll for the entire Vietnam war:

Disclaimer: I’m aware that we have more troops in-theater in Iraq than we had during the corresponding parts of the Vietnam War graph. Vietnam didn’t get numbers of US troops comparable to the number currently in Iraq until shortly after Johnson won the 1964 election, some three-and-a-half years after the starting point of the Vietnam graphs above.

These graphs are not intended to say anything about the relative lethality of the two conflicts. Nor am I trying to make a case that the Iraq war is somehow equivalent to, or worse than, the Vietnam war. I was just curious how the “death profile” of the two wars compared, and these graphs let me see that. You are free to draw your own conclusions.

You can view more discussion of these charts on the following pages, if you’re interested. The graphs are all the same; I just update them in place when the new numbers become available.

• US deaths in Vietnam and Iraq by month
• Iraq war deaths
• November: The cruelest month
• 41 US Iraq war dead in December
• Post-Saddam death toll up slightly
• February death toll down for us, up for them
• Thirteen months in
• Record US deaths in April
• US War Dead in Iraq for May
• US Iraq Deaths Down in June

Here’s the counterweight to the piece I posted the other day that spoke of some folks predicting a Bush landslide in November. From Michael of Discourse.net: Election polls and predictions. Michael sees a landslide coming, but the way he figures it, it’s going to be a landslide for Kerry.

As stated previously, an objective analysis of the data cannot support both positions: either the data clearly show an oncoming Bush landslide, an oncoming Kerry landslide, or neither. My own take as of now: Kerry will win by a significant, but not overwhelming, margin. He’ll take all, or nearly all, of the solid-blue states from 2000, will lose all, or nearly all, of the solid-red states from 2000, but will outperform Bush sufficiently in the purple states to make the difference.

I hadn’t seen this graphic before, but now that I have I think it’s really funny. But you might have to be me to think so. Anyway, from Professor Pollkatz: So it begins.

Here’s a trio of stories about the Abu Ghraib abuses. From Rolling Stone: The secret file of Abu Ghraib. From the Sunday Herald (of somewhere in Scotland; apologies to my ancestors in Callender for being so vague on things Scottish): Iraq’s child prisoners. And from Newsweek: A battle over blame.

There’s not too much that’s new here, if you’ve been following the story. The Rolling Stone piece talks about the additional detail available in the full Taguba report, while the Sunday Herald repeats the stories about child abuse, with a little more on where UNICEF stands on things. The Newsweek piece is news to me; it predicts that the commission Rumsfeld picked to investigate the Abu Ghraib abuses is going to come down pretty hard on the senior Pentagon leadership, including Rumsfeld.

There’s been a lot of talk in certain webloggish circles about the failure of anyone at the Democratic convention to mention the Abu Ghraib abuses. I guess the strategists decided it had the potential to backfire. It wouldn’t have matched the upbeat mood they were going for, and it would have worked against the “we support the military, and won’t hesitate to blow people up when it’s in the national interest” storyline they were pushing.

So they tacitly agreed to join the Republicans in looking the other way. Like a lot of Americans, probably, they chose to avoid the implications of what the Abu Ghraib abuses say about who we are, what we’ve done, and where we’re headed. So go ahead and read the articles linked to above. Or don’t. But if you choose not to, don’t kid yourself. The rest of the world doesn’t have the same incentive to ignore the story. They’re hanging on every word.

Do you hear that sound? That’s the dim, distant echo of our national honor.

I love stories like this. After years of complaints from the Feds about violence in TV and Movies, they are asking Hollywood for help in the imagination department, to try and anticipate unusual terrorist attacks.

I love the scene in My Blue Heaven where Steve Martin’s Todd/Vinnie tells Joan Cusack’s Hannah Stubbs, “‘Oh, really?’ You gotta do better than that; you’re gonna lose the argument.” (Here’s an mp3 file of it, courtesy of WaveCentral.com.)

I think Bush is losing the argument. Since Kerry came out strong on the national security issue at the convention, I’ve been noticing a certain stridency and incoherence in the Bush team’s responses. It’s not any one incident, any one news account of the two sides’ daily campaigning and spinning and counter-spinning, but it just feels to me, in a subtle but real way, that the Bush team is coming up short.

I know the early polls showed only a small Kerry bounce, if any, from the convention. I know the Bush visuals team have been placing him in front of enthusiastic crowds, and he’s been energized and engaged, and has a big media push coming that Kerry, hobbled by post-convention spending limits, can’t match. I know that Bush supporters in the weblog world are finding any number of stories to make them happy about their guy’s chances.

But there’s something there. Maybe it’s that, with the campaign well and truly under way, and non-politically-obsessed people actually paying attention, a new level of scrutiny is being applied to the two campaigns’ daily messages. And people are noticing that while the Kerry team has a consistent, rational-sounding message with supporting arguments, the Bush folks are mostly peddling slogans.

We’ve “turned a corner”? You gotta do better than that; you’re gonna lose the argument.

John McCain doesn’t like seeing the same stuff that was pulled on him during his 2000 campaign being pulled now on Kerry: McCain condemns anti-Kerry ad.

I realize the Bush folks believe they have to try to neutralize Kerry’s war-hero status, but I honestly think this is going to backfire. In six months’ time, I think we may well be looking back on this as the defining moment of the presidential campaign, when mainstream voters looked at the two sides’ arguments and concluded that it was Kerry, not Bush, they were willing to entrust with the presidency.

Update: For the closest thing I think you’re going to be able to find to an objective debunking of the Swift-boat charges, see this Snopes page: Swift justice. Courtesy of a commenter on Donald Sensing’s piece Swift boat veterans speak out.

Matthew Yglesias has this interesting commentary on an email he received from Paul Krugman. It deals with the subject of whether or not it’s really “lying” when Bush says something hypertechnically true that nevertheless creates a false impression. The commentary is really more about the media, and the role they play in reliably conveying the misleading impression to its intended audience, than about Bush, though: Who parses the parsers?

Kevin Drum wants to make sure we know he was talking about Bush’s particular approach to lying since October of last year, too: Classifying the lies.

Anyway, we couldn’t be the obsessed-with-public-figure-mendacity weblog-of-record that we are without acknowledging the discussion. Plus I can get some cheap traffic via the trackback links. So there you go.

It’s comforting to me that in the midst of all the troubles of the world today, people still find time to engage in stupid stunts. Like this one: Segway across America at 10 MPH.

Interesting little email exchange between a non-US scientist and an American physics journal, in which the former declines to review a manuscript for the latter in light of the US role in putting science to evil uses: Interchange of letters between Prof. Daniel Amit and an American scientific journal.

Link courtesy of Radically Inept.

Winston Smith at Philosoraptor is upset at seeing Bill O’Reilly run roughshod over Paul Krugman on a Tim Russert talkshow: OReilly punks Krugman.

This sounds like one of those “debates” that the creationist crowd occasionally sets up with some university professor on the subject of evolution. Typically, the creationist position is represented by an experienced, practiced participant in such fora, while the natural-selection position is represented by Joe Random PhD, unused to debating. The result is predictable.

Entertainment and honest inquiry aren’t the same thing, just as politics and science aren’t the same thing. You can dress up the one as if it were the other, but that doesn’t change its essential nature. In putting on a program that is news mixed together with entertainment, you have to decide which master to serve. There may have been a time when TV news served the master of journalistic ethics in preference to the master of ratings-driven entertainment, but if so that time has come and gone. Letting a professional blowhard like Bill O’Reilly bully a timid economics professor in the name of determining the truth about their respective political views demonstrates that pretty neatly.

Joshua Micah Marshall offers a very interesting analysis of the logic, or lack thereof, in the neocons’ conflating of Iraq with al Qaeda for War on Terra purposes: Doug Feith, Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, had an OpEd…

If you haven’t seen it yet, this site’s red-state/blue-state map is pretty cool: Current Electoral Vote Predictor 2004.

I guess it’s too early to start counting the Kerry-victory chickens, but it’s fun to look at.

From the interesting-looking First Draft weblog (found via Michael Froomkin’s Discourse.net) comes this item, in which author Athenae reflects on the energy that Kerry and Edwards seem to be tapping into on the campaign trail: We are many.

During the Second World War, Americans bought war bonds and planted Victory Gardens and saved cooking grease, and maybe all of that was necessary and maybe it wasn’t, but it gave non-military, non-governmental people a way to feel a part of the struggle. It gave them something to do besides sit in their houses, listen to the radio and worry. It gave them a direction for their energy, and it gave them, most of all, the feeling that they had power over world events. Suddenly the war didn’t seem so big anymore, my grandmother told me once, because we were doing something to win it.

For three years now, those of us lucky enough not to have to go to war ourselves have been told by the government that there’s nothing we can do, really. Go on with your lives, Tom Ridge and John Ashcroft tell us, but be very, very afraid. They’re telling us terrorists hate us for stuff we can’t or shouldn’t change, that peace isn’t possible, that the only thing people of good will can do to help matters here at home is to buy, buy, buy.

But shopping doesn’t give people a sense of power over their lives.

In light of this whole discussion of O’Reilly beating up on Krugman on Russert’s show, I feel compelled to mention something that, at least for me, occupies the opposite end of the spectrum of political TV (that is, the good end): Jon Stewart’s work on The Daily Show. And in particular, this clip, which I watched when it aired last week, and which was heart-breakingly good, and which is now (yay!) available as a Real Media video clip on ComedyCentral.com: Jon asks Republican Congressman Harry Bonilla to name names. (Hopefully I’ve de-eviled the javascript successfully for you to link directly to the clip. If not, go to the Daily Show page and look for it in the list of “celebrity interviews” on the righthand side.)

Bonilla was part of the Republicans’ “rapid response” team during the Democratic convention; he comes off as the nicest, most decent-seeming guy you’d ever meet. It isn’t shown on the clip, but when the interview began he congratulated Stewart on the recent birth of his son, and gave him a present of a pair of baby-sized cowboy boots with “G.O.P. ROCKS” on the soles. It was really pretty cute; not as sappy as it sounds. Bonilla was positively Clinton-esque in his ability to exude charm; if that had been me up there interviewing him, there would have been no way I could have gone after him for his role in foisting lies upon the public without myself coming off as the world’s biggest asshole.

But not Stewart. He rolled up his sleeves and went to work, matching charm for charm, quip for quip. When the clip begins they’re talking about the oft-repeated Republican charge that Kerry and Edwards are the “first and fourth-most liberal senators.” Kerry tries to get Bonilla to acknowledge where the ranking came from. Bonilla fights him every step of the way, creatively misconstruing Stewart’s questions, talking over him, clouding the issues with a verbal fog machine of reasonable-sounding misdirection, but Stewart stays on-target.

By the end of the clip Stewart has managed to expose Bonilla’s spin-peddling, and worked in his own heartfelt plea for honesty in public debate, all without seeming like a jerk.

It’s really quite amazing. In my personal reality, this clip ranks up there with the Onion’s God angrily clarifies ‘don’t kill’ rule (since walled off behind a for-pay requirement at the Onion’s site, but available several other places via that damn irrepressible Internet) as an example of the kind of humor-as-therapy that keeps me sane in the face of an insane world.

Update: And now, because I was inspired, I’ve transcribed the part of the interview included in the clip, so you can enjoy it even without Real Player. Scroll down, or follow the link below, for that.

(more…)

My wife used to work for a record label, and for some reason Ike Turner used to hang out in the parking lot there, working on his car. Which has nothing much to do with the following, but it’s what I thought of when I saw it at McSweeney’s: Ike Turner’s guide to restoring America’s honor.

In keeping with the prodigious comment production on my earlier item re: the O’Reilly/Krugman debacle (courtesy lies.com’s #1 googlerank in searches for “o’reilly krugman russert”), here’s the Daily Howler debunking O’Reilly’s bluster in detail: Tail-gunner Bill!

A while back I posted what could be described as A liberal’s case for George Bush. At the time, I encouraged any conservatives in the crowd who wanted to engage in a similar exercise on behalf of Kerry to do so. No one took me up on it, but now I see this interesting item in the New York Press by William Bryk: The conservative case against George W. Bush.

Bryk doesn’t make the case for Kerry directly (or even mention Kerry by name), but he definitely goes after Bush. In fact, it seems clear that he’s not engaged in a mere mental exercise; he means it. Granted, some of the reasons he offers are different from the ones I’d offer, but he makes a compelling case all the same. See what you think.

From some web page in a language I can’t understand, a collection of really cool-looking aerial photographs: Link.

Update: Per commenter Daniel, these images are actually the work of French photographer Yann Arthus-Bertrand. Many more images, and different-sized versions, are available from Arthus-Bertrand’s Earth from above site.

From Plaid Adder of Democratic Underground comes one of the best essays I’ve read in a while: Panic Button. I heartily recommend reading the whole thing, but here’s an excerpt from his conclusion:

It’s been almost three years since the towers came down. If we really don’t want the terrorists to win, then it is about time that we stopped letting our own government jerk us around. Al Qaeda’s primary weapon is not the box cutter, the airplane, the unidentified white powder or the bomb: it’s fear. In the war on terrorism, the one damn thing that we as average Americans can do is to refuse to be terrified. Even and especially when our own government tells us to.

In the end, death is going to come for us all like a thief in the night, no matter how prepared we think we are. Till that time, all we can really do is live as well as we can. Eventually, fear kills all the things that make life worth living - love, joy, compassion, community, desire, creativity. It’s up to us to protect ourselves from this death of the heart, even if we can’t do anything to protect our bodies.

I have to give the folks at the Wall Street Journal’s OpinionJournal credit for being willing to provide a forum for Jim Rassmann to rebut the lies of Swift Boat Veterans for Truth: Shame on the Swift Boat Veterans for Bush.

Josh Micah Marshall says that he’s seen a preview of a study showing that the ad has been effective with independents, which means we can look forward to lots more blatant, shameless lying of this sort. I wonder how long John McCain can continue talking out of both sides of his mouth on this, condemning the ad as dishonest and dishonorable, while campaigning on behalf of the person behind it.

On one hand I’m a firm believer in the oncept of “earning citizenship” — but this isn’t what I had in mind: “Gana la Verde” is a spanish langauge game show modeled after Fear Factor, in which contests compete for a Green Card … except they don’t raelly. What they compete for is the promise of a team of Lawyers to work hard at getting them a Green Card for one year. As you can expect many Immigration Lawyers and Rights Activists are a little displeased. What I want to know, is how you justify giving someone a prize of “good intentions” — especially given that by going on this show, illegal immigrants draw attention to themselves.
(Thanks to Back In Black for brining this to my attention)

Proving once again that I get all of my news from the Daily Show, I’d like to point out the following “blog” (god I hate that word): SpinSanity…

Ben Fritz, Bryan Keefer, and Brendan Nyhan are young writers who edit Spinsanity, the nation’s leading watchdog of manipulative political rhetoric. Since founding the site in 2001, their award-winning analysis has been cited in scores of national and international media outlets, including CNN, Fox News Channel, the New York Times, and the Washington Post, and they have appeared on numerous radio and television shows. In 2002, they were featured in a regular column on Salon, and they can currently be found every Thursday on the commentary page of the Philadelphia Inquirer.

I got tired of the Kevin Kelly/Wired magazine-style of breathless technological optimism pretty early on. “The future’s here, and it’s amazing!” To a certain extent I’ve let my disdain for the stylistic approach those folks use spill over into a generalized dislike of the whole Bay Area techno-libertarian scene. But having put my wank-o-meter in neutral long enough to read this John Perry Barlow interview by Brian Doherty, I found that it’s actually pretty interesting.

I especially like the discussion of his fight against a misdemeanor drug bust. (He had a small amount of marijuana in his checked luggage while flying; it was found during a Department of Homeland Security search and they pulled him off the plane before departure and arrested him. He’s fighting to exclude the evidence on Fourth Amendment grounds.) I also like his take on John Kerry; it matches up almost exactly with my own.

Anyway, from the latest issue of Reason magazine: John Perry Barlow 2.0: The Thomas Jefferson of cyberspace reinvents his body — and his politics.

In honor of the hay the righties are making with Kerry’s statements about being in Cambodia at Christmastime in 1968 (which I, for one, am inclined to believe; illegal incursions being, well, illegal, I don’t consider the lack of confirming evidence especially suggestive), here’s an item on what George Bush was up to around the same time: George W. Bush sucker-punches a rugby opponent at Yale.

That Bush managed to raise eyebrows for playing dirty during a rugby match is actually pretty impressive, on some level. As the original op-ed piece in the LA Times indicated, dissemination of this photo might well help, rather than hurt, Bush’s election prospects. Americans love a bad boy, and all that.

Here’s a quartet of interesting Iraq stories I’ve seen in the last day.

First, Scott Forbes considers how the neocons’ vision of a wave of democracy that would sweep the region have largely come unraveled: Domino theory.

My sense now is that George W. Bush has neither the political capital nor the international prestige to follow through on the neocon vision, if indeed that vision was ever possible. In fact, I suspect that no Republican, in the present circumstances, can lead us to victory in the so-called War on Terror: It’s an “only Nixon can go to China” problem, but in reverse. Only a Democrat can now argue the case for democracy without getting tangled up in doctrines of pre-emption and intelligence failures; Bush and his GOP colleagues can’t make the argument effectively.

Next, Fred Kaplan has an interesting, if depressing, piece in Slate: No way out.

This is a terribly grim thing to say, but there might be no solution to the problem of Iraq. There might be nothing we can do to build a path to a stable, secure, let alone democratic regime. And there’s no way we can just pull out without plunging the country, the region, and possibly beyond into still deeper disaster.

Joshua Micah Marshall is afraid that Kaplan is right, and offers additional commentary: Fred Kaplan has a bleak but, I fear, quite possibly accurate piece on Iraq today…

As the shrewdest thinkers on the left and the right concede on this issue, our true strategic challenges in the Muslim Middle East are not conventional military ones, but hearts-and-minds challenges. The trick is to figure out how we can solve or ameliorate that hearts-and-minds problem while simultaneously destroying the relatively small (in numerical terms) but highly lethal groups that constitute an imminent danger. Or, to put it more crisply, how do we wipe out al Qaida (and al Qaida-like groups) without generating so much bad blood in the Islamic world that the Islamic world keeps producing new al Qaidas faster than we can destroy them?

It’s not clear to me necessarily what the best way to strike that balance is. But I think this is probably the worst way — engaging in pitched battles with fighters who pose no direct danger to the US whatsoever in a way that does profound damage to our standing within the population that al Qaida and other similarly-inclined groups hope to do their recruiting.

Finally, as the death toll (on all sides) continues to climb, here’s another one of those depressing reminders of the still larger number of lives being blasted by horrific injuries: A purple heart for Jessica.

Josh Micah Marshall speaks today of a David Broder column in which Broder points out the obvious about Emperor Bush’s new clothes: Bush’s two albatrosses.

The factors that make President Bush a vulnerable incumbent have almost nothing to do with his opponent, John F. Kerry. They stem directly from two closely linked, high-stakes policy gambles that Bush chose on his own. Neither has worked out as he hoped.

The first gamble was the decision to attack Iraq; the second, to avoid paying for the war. The rationale for the first decision was to remove the threat of a hostile dictator armed with weapons of mass destruction. The weapons were never found. The rationale for the second decision — the determination to keep cutting taxes in the face of far higher spending for Iraq and the war on terrorism — was to stimulate the American economy and end the drought of jobs. The deficits have accumulated, but the jobs have still not come back.

Marshall’s commentary on Broder is basically to wonder how long it will take before the “conventional wisdom” represented by Broder’s analysis takes hold in the media.

Kos has a nice juxtaposition of a pair of images from last week’s campaigning in Portland, Oregon: Compare and contrast: Bush and Kerry rallies.

Again, it’s hard to be sure, with both sides doing their best to obscure reality, but I think there’s a real difference here. Bush’s entire presidency has been about working very, very hard to maintain the illusion that he is qualified for the job. They’re still doing that, and it’s still working about as well as it ever did, at least for those willing to suspend their judgement in the name of ideological predisposition.

But Kerry’s campaign is something different. It’s actually the real thing. Or at least, behind the artifice that they also bring to the task of portraying their guy in the best light, there’s an actual groundswell of support, and real excitement, and big (actually, huge) crowds. If you look at those two pictures, and assess them in the context of the hundreds of other similar pictures (and descriptions) that have been floating by of the two candidates’ campaign events, the difference is really quite striking.

It will be interesting to see if and when the mainstream media take note of this difference.

Matthew Yglesias has a really good opinion piece that reviews the history of our collective love-hate relationship with Bush’s intellect: The brains thing.

The other day, while watching my 13-year-old surfing and my 6-year-old appeasing his inner Xerxes by flogging the waves with a strand of kelp, I lounged under an umbrella with my wife’s copy of the September, 2004, issue of Vanity Fair.

I don’t read the magazine all the time, partly because it’s so much work to page through all the advertising showing fashionable young people who are supposedly fabulously good-looking, but who look to me more like a vaguely bored army of undead anorexics. But the September issue is worth the effort because of two articles.

The first is “The Monarchy of George II.” It is be-blurbed in the magazine’s web-based TOC thusly:

Reformed ne’er-do-well, reckless warrior, profligate spender — George W. Bush bears an uncanny resemblance to Shakespeare’s Henry V, who also launched an invasion that turned out badly. As the president awaits the voters’ verdict, acclaimed historian Niall Ferguson warns that time’s judgment may be exceedingly unkind. Illustrations by Paul Davis, Brad Holland, Gerald Scarfe, and Edward Sorel.

The second good article in the issue is “Of War and Presidents.” Blurb:

Another election year, another descent into the patriotic fault line left by Vietnam. As Republicans who avoided military service question John Kerry’s valor, David Halberstam explores a cultural divide that confuses warriors with wimps and courage with blind aggression.

So, in keeping with the apparent wishes of the corporate owners of those pieces, I hereby encourage you to go out and buy that issue in dead-tree form. Here’s a link to their TOC-cum-subscription-come-on, complete with stolen image of an improbably dressed Reese Witherspoon:

As long as I’m encouraging people, though, I’m compelled to encourage said corporate owners to reconsider their silly anti-Web policy. These are important pieces; they should be part of the public debate surrounding the election. If you’d put them online, I could link to them, rather than just linking to your TOC. People would follow those links, and read the articles. Many of those readers would be impressed. Some of them would go out and buy your magazine in order to have access ot that information in a more-convenient form (albeit with anorexics).

Note that none of your advertisers would be hurt by this. They would, in fact, be helped by it. Your antediluvian judgement that this web thing could be safely ignored, keeping your cherished words safely segregated from its piratical masses, has been proven wrong. Get with the program.

With this posting I am violating several of the extremely stupid provisions of the Athens2004.com hyperlink policy. So there.

From Paul Waldman at Fly Trap, here’s a nice, succinct analysis of the truth content of the two non-campaign campaign ads currently showing on a swing-state TV near you: I denounce your non-denouncement.

From the fine people at Sadly, No! comes this wee math lesson, courtesy of Presidential Spokesmetician Scott McClellen: * (yeah, just *).

This article from the New York Times highlights our current leadership’s willingness to casually engage in profoundly un-American activities. In this case, that means perverting the ‘material witness’ statute into a tool for locking up, and then keeping under severe travel restrictions, for more than a year, a US citizen not even suspected of having any complicity in a crime: For post-9/11 material witness, it is a terror of a different kind.

Your daily round-up of items on the Swift boat ad:

From Joshua Micah Marshall: “Let’s get some things straight here…”

From Slate’s William Saletan and Jacob Weisberg: Unfriendly fire.

From the Washington Post: Records counter a critic of Kerry.

Finally, from the New Republic’s Kenneth Baer: Frontal assault. Baer argues that rather than following the traditional political wisdom of simply ignoring an attack based on lies, Kerry should counter-attack by initiating a libel suit against the sponsors of the ad.

Oh, and I may as well throw this into the mix: Kevin Drum summing up the whole “Christmas in Cambodia” thing that has the “Kerry must be defeated at any cost” crowd in a tizzy: Kerry in Cambodia.

Susan of Suburban Guerrilla passes along a fun email she received from a playwright who lives about four blocks from Madison Square Garden. (Update: Um, no. It was’t emailed to her; it was received by someone else, who posted it in the comments on Atrios’ weblog.) The woman (update: nope; man) was recently visited by a pair of FBI agents who allegedly threatened her with arrest (er, threatened him with arrest) for putting a “Dump Bush” sign in her (his) window: Protecting American values.

I’m glad to see that John Ashcroft has the Bureau’s priorities straight.

I don’t normally watch soccer (what the rest of the world calls football). But when a high-profile game comes along (the US-hosted World Cup a few years back, the Olympics, that sort of thing), I’ll check it out. I’ve come to appreciate the way it can be interesting even without constant scoring; there’s an ebb and flow to the game, a continuous movement favoring one side and then the other, punctuated by the sudden excitement of an attack or counter-attack.

Anyway, I’ve been sucked in by the gutsy play and human-interest back-story of the Iraqi men’s team at the Olympics, which made this article from Sports Illustrated a must-read for me: Iraqi soccer players upset about Bush campaign ads using team.

Thanks to John F. of the Stonegauge for the link.

The New York Times offers a thoroughly damning assessment of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth today: Friendly fire: The birth of an anti-Kerry ad.

Mr. Kerry called them “a front for the Bush campaign” - a charge the campaign denied.

A series of interviews and a review of documents show a web of connections to the Bush family, high-profile Texas political figures and President Bush’s chief political aide, Karl Rove.

Records show that the group received the bulk of its initial financing from two men with ties to the president and his family - one a longtime political associate of Mr. Rove’s, the other a trustee of the foundation for Mr. Bush’s father’s presidential library. A Texas publicist who once helped prepare Mr. Bush’s father for his debate when he was running for vice president provided them with strategic advice. And the group’s television commercial was produced by the same team that made the devastating ad mocking Michael S. Dukakis in an oversized tank helmet when he and Mr. Bush’s father faced off in the 1988 presidential election.

The strategy the veterans devised would ultimately paint John Kerry the war hero as John Kerry the “baby killer” and the fabricator of the events that resulted in his war medals. But on close examination, the accounts of Swift Boat Veterans for Truth’ prove to be riddled with inconsistencies. In many cases, material offered as proof by these veterans is undercut by official Navy records and the men’s own statements.

Several of those now declaring Mr. Kerry “unfit” had lavished praise on him, some as recently as last year.

The article has lots more detail. So the question before us now is, in the presence of a bunch of made-up shit that smears one candidate, but which plays well in 30-second attack ads, despite being transparently false to anyone who analyzes the charges with anything approaching a critical eye, how will the voting public react?

Truly, this election is going to be vitally important in defining what kind of government we’re going to have. Whichever choice we make, we’re going to get exactly what we deserve.

On a related issue, be sure to check out Joshua Micah Marshall’s excerpt from yesterday’s press gaggle with Bush press secretary Scott McClellan, conducted at the Crawford Middle School. (Yes; fearless leader is on vacation again.) Anyway: Amazing. President Bush isn’t even man enough…

Maybe now, people will start taking the the issues of TSA “secret lists” seriously: Ted Kennedy (the senator) has repeatedly been delayed in getting on flights because T. Kennedy (the suspected terrorist) has a similar name. The only reason he was ever able to get on the planes is because Airline supervisors recognized him, and the only reason he was ultimately able to get off the list was because Tom Ridge stepped in and personally took care of the matter. As Kennedy puts it: “How are [ordinary citizens] going to be able to get to be treated fairly and not have their rights abused?”

Amazingly, Kennedy is not the only congressman to have this problem.

Susan of Suburban Guerrilla does a good job expressing the sense of outrage that’s been growing in me lately at the way some of the mainstream media have been willing to accept the Bush crowd’s argument that the Swifties’ ad and the MoveOn response are the same sort of thing: A letter to the media.

Anyway, because you’re all so rusty with this principled-and-hardworking-journalist thing, there’s a point I’d like to make: You can’t really compare the Swift Boat Veterans ads with those MoveOn.org ads. Can you guess why?

It’s because the content of the Moveon.org ads is what we call “factual” and the Swift Boat Veterans ads are what we call “lies.” See the difference?

If you’re one of those who doesn’t like Paul Krugman, you won’t like his latest column. He indulges in a nice little type-M argument (i.e., he attributes impure motives to Bush, and attacks those motives rather than confining himself to attacking the outcome of Bush’s actions).

But this isn’t science, or a courtroom, or an Olympic judging panel, where objectivity is supposed to be sacrosanct. This is an opinion column, and it’s the columnist’s job to tell a compelling story about the world as he sees it; you can take that story or leave it, as you see fit.

From where I sit, Krugman hits it pretty close: The Rambo coalition.

I think this may be one of the best things I’ve ever read by Joshua Micah Marshall. And that’s saying a lot: With the president descending to the most shameless sort of attack politics…

An excerpt:

The current debate about these two men’s military service has put the spotlight on physical courage. But that really is a side issue in this campaign, if we’re talking substance. The real issue isn’t physical bravery but moral cowardice.

President Bush is an examplar of that quality in spades. And it cuts directly to his failures as president. Forget about thirty years ago, just think about the last three years.

Before proceeding on to that, one other point about the two men’s service. On the balance sheet of moral bravery, as opposed to physical bravery, the two men are about as far apart as you can be on Vietnam. On the one hand you have Kerry, who already had doubts about whether we should be fighting in Vietnam before he went, and put his life on the line anyway. On the other hand, you have George W. Bush who supported the war, which means he believed the goal was worth the cost in American lives. Only, not his life. He believed others should go; just not him. It’s the story of his life.

That is almost the definition of moral cowardice.

We have a more immediate sense of what physical bravery and cowardice are. In fact, when we speak of bravery and cowardice, the physical variety is almost always what we’re talking about. It’s whether or not you can charge an enemy position while you’re be fired at. It’s whether you’re immobilized by the fear of death.

Moral cowardice is more complex. A moral coward is someone who lacks the courage to tell the truth, to accept responsibility, to demand accountability, to do what’s right when it’s not the easy thing to do, to clean up his or her own messes. Perhaps we could say that moral bravery is having both the courage of your convictions as well as the courage of your misdeeds.

As I’ve been saying here for the last couple days, the issue isn’t that Bush ducked service in Vietnam. It’s that he tries to smear other people’s meritorious service without taking responsibility for what he’s doing. He gets other people to do his dirty work for him. Again, that image of McCain calling him on his shameless antics and his look of fear, his look of feeling trapped.

The key for the Kerry campaign to make is that the president’s moral cowardice is why we’re now bogged down in Iraq. It’s a key reason why almost a thousand Americans have died there. President Bush has set the tone for this administration and his moral cowardice permeates it.

There’s more, and it’s all really, really good. It gets right to the heart of what bothers me about Bush, and about the latest Swift boat shenanigans by Rove and Co.

Janus/Onan made a comment the other day that I was getting kind of out of control with the Bush-hater stuff lately. To the extent you feel the same way, apologies for the zealotry. But the man really does have no business whatsoever being president of the United States, and this piece does a great job of explaining why.

I first heard about J.S.G. Boggs a few years ago while watching a Nova episode about counterfeiting. But for some reason the subject of his particular brand of loony performance art came up in conversation the other day, so I googled him and have a few links to pass along.

Boggs’ story goes something like this: He was fascinated with the artwork on currency, so he started drawing his own. At a certain point this evolved into the following: He goes to some retail establishment or restaurant and tries to get the clerk or waitress or whatever to accept, in lieu of actual payment, a hand-drawn bill, signed by him, for the amount he owes. He explains that all artwork’s valuation is more or less arbitrary, so he has set the value of his artwork at the face value of whatever bill he’s reproducing.

More often than you’d think, the clerk or waitress agrees to the deal, which is where it gets interesting. Boggs takes the receipt and gives it to one of the many collectors of his work, who in turn tracks down the bill’s recipient and buys it, often at many times the face value. This American Life’s Ira Glass wrote this about it in Meeting J.S.G. Boggs, the counterfeit artist:

What I love about this is that it’s a con game, run in reverse. If the person falls for the game, they come out of it far wealthier than they went in. As Weschler puts it in his joyous little book, Boggs operates “a sort of floating aesthetical ethical crap game. Or else a sort of fairy-tale virtue test, in which the worthy agreed to sacrifice and [are] subsequently rewarded a hundredfold.”

Naturally this has led to Boggs being the focus of law-enforcement attention. He’s been charged with counterfeiting, and acquitted, in Great Britain, and has had the US Secret Service show up at his door and confiscate extensive “samples” of his work. Interestingly, despite the fact that the Justice Department decided it had better things to do than prosecute an artist whose “counterfeit” bills are only drawn on one side (the back of the bill gets Boggs’ thumbprint and signature), the Secret Service refused to return his confiscated materials, arguing that they were “contraband” under federal law, and that even without actually prosecuting Boggs for anything, they were entitled to keep them.

Boggs sued for the return of his artwork, and the suit eventuallly made it as far as the US district court of appeals. You can read an actually-pretty-interesting transcript of the ensuing oral arguments on Boggs’ web site.

I’m not sure how all that eventually turned out, but I’m curious. And I love the following observation from Glass’s article:

I don’t feel like I’m leaving the territory of journalistic objectivity to say that somehow this does not seem fair. Our government is seizing his property without any trial, any chance to argue his case, any due process at all. He’s trying to generate some press about all this, but so far the attention he’s got is modest. What’s crazy about the whole thing is that he’s convinced he’d have stopped drawing U.S. currency years ago, because he’s got tired of it, but now he has to keep doing it to keep his income up for this lawsuit.

The money drawings are the only thing he creates that earns him the kind of real cash he needs right now. But he’s weary of drawing money. He’s tried every variation on it. He’s ready to move on to other kinds of artistic creation. In short: If the Treasury Department weren’t harassing him, trying to bully him into quitting his money drawings, he’d have quit years ago.

Anyway, there you go: A temporary reprieve from my recent Kerry/Bush/Swift boat obsession.

I had another dream about George Bush last night. In the dream it was nighttime, and I was at some kind of fancy Spanish-style rambling estate/hotel; the sort of place with a big fountain out front and a bunch of separate outbuildings and bungalows and gardens and winding paths. There was an event going on with lots of dignitaries, and I can’t remember why I was there; that was from the early part of the dream, and it’s fuzzy. Because this was one of those dreams that goes on and on and on.

(The last dream, where I was Colin Powell, only covered a few seconds of in-dream time. But this one, where I was just myself, took hours. At least, the plot that was covered in the dream stretched across that kind of time. The dream itself, I realize, was probably pretty quick.)

Anyway, I was at this rambling estate/hotel, and somehow I ended up in this smallish group that the president was interacting with. Maybe I was hanging out with the president’s web guys, or something. I was talking to them, and then Bush just kinda showed up. And I’m acting the way I act when I’m around a celebrity, which is to just try to act cool and natural and not make a scene, since I know the celebrity gets people acting weird all the time, and I’d rather just be a normal person to them.

And somehow it develops that Bush wants to leave this event. He wants to duck out, get away from all his handlers and retinue. He gives me the keys to his limo (which in the dream I keep wanting to refer to as “Air Force One,” even though I realize that’s wrong; it’s not his airplane, it’s just his car). He asks me to go get his coat (which is checked at the hat check), and get his limo, and meet him “over by that yellow house, over there” (pointing to this house a short ways away). And I’m like, “in the street over there, in front of the house?” and he’s like, “no, at the house itself.” And I say, “okay,” and I set off on my mission.

I get the coat pretty easily. It’s in a garment bag, like you use on a plane. So I’ve got the keys to the president’s limo, and I’m carrying this garment bag with the president’s coat in it, and I’m trying to find the limo so I can drive it over to this appointed place. And I’m wandering all over, taking more and more time, and I just can’t find the limo.

At one point I’m passing a big group of people lined up outside one of the buildings, and I see my wife and her brother and maybe some other people I know in the line. (They’re here for the same reason that brought me to the place, whatever that reason was. But we weren’t together when the whole Bus