Why Bush = Hitler

Watching the vitriol many on the extreme left wing seem to delight in pouring on Bush, one is struck by the self refutation of the the loonier accusations. If Bush were like Hitler or the Republicans were like Nazis saying so would get people thrown in jail. The fact that those making the accusations are marching in public and not in jail refutes their accusations as soon as they are made. Since this is obvious to everyone watching the demonstrators why do they persist in making such statements. The answer is that the accusations are not about Bush at all but rather the self perception of the demonstrators.
If Bush is just a typical center right politician, trying in his own way to make the world better for the average American his opposition are just ordinary people who have an honest disagreement with their country's leader. However, if Bush is really an evil man bent on ruining democracy and hurting those who do not share his radical ideology, than his opponents are heroic forces for good. The protestors need Bush to be evil so that they became good. The more evil Bush and the republicans are, the more heroic the protestors become in their self regard. Thus the seemingly crazy statements and accusations against Bush and his administration are believed by the protestors even though they are obviously false.

Wild Overgeneralization

Red state - blue state comparisons have become a cliche over the last 4 years, but let me add one thought I have not heard elsewhere on the subject. Kerry's task is made harder by changes in population among the states. If Kerry wins all the states Gore won and Bush wins all the states he won in 2000 Bush will pick up seven more electoral college votes due to movement of population from Gore states to Bush states. This seems to indicate that people prefer to live in Republican controlled states rather than Democratic controlled ones. This revealed preference seems to bode well for Republicans in the future. However, it also means uglier presidential races as partisans will have an easier time demonizing the opposition's membership and candidate.

This week's poem

Demain, dès l'aube...
Demain, dès l'aube, à l'heure où blanchit la campagne
Je partirai. Vois-tu, je sais que tu m'attends.
J'irai par la forêt, j'irai par la montagne.
Je ne puis demeurer loin de toi plus longtemps.
Je marcherai les yeux fixés sur mes pensées,
Sans rien voir au dehors, sans entendre aucun bruit,
Seul, inconnu, le dos courbé, les mains croisées,
Triste, et le jour pour moi sera comme la nuit.
Je ne regarderai ni l'or du soir qui tombe,
Ni les voiles au loin descendant vers Harfleur,
Et quand j'arriverai, je mettrai sur ta tombe
Un bouquet de houx vert et de bruyère en fleur.

I am an Ignorant Voter

Many have noted that during this election season we seem to be debating the Vietnam war more than the current war. People are still arguing whether protesting the Vietnam war the way Kerry did was an honorable thing or was tantamount to treason. Other arguments are about things as fundamental as whether the war was winnable and if it was why we lost it. I think it is instructive that over 30 years after the end of the Vietnam people can still have widely opposing views on such elemental questions.
I just finished reading "The New Dealer's War" by Thomas Fleming about FDR's leadership of WW2. He argues that far from FDR being the wise leader who shepherding us through the war, his stubbornness needlessly prolonged the war and cost hundreds of thousands of people their lives. When I was a child I had a keen interest in WW2 and read many books about it, yet I had never encountered Fleming's criticisms of FDR's leadership before. The fact that 60 years later people can come to hugely different positions on events should temper our certainties when dealing with current events.
It seems as though the current conventional wisdom is that the situation in Iraq is a mess and that Bush has badly blundered in the aftermath of the war. Each bit of bad news is presented as further evidence that the situation in Iraq is spinning out of control and that our efforts to build a democratic and free Iraq are doomed. Many in the blogosphere have attempted to counteract this by publishing optimistic stories from soldiers and publicizing the blogs of free Iraqis. Having read many of these accounts I get the feeling that things in Iraq are going pretty well. However, that is just a guess. I recall in the first days of the war I was glued to the TV, excited about the prospect of a free Iraq but scared of what could happen to our troops. The reports from embedded reporters lent an immediacy that information junkies like me really appreciated. However, after a few days of watching as much news as I could and hearing reports from all around Iraq and speculation by pundits I realized that I did not have any real idea of what was going on over there. I had lots of information but no framework to put it in that let me know what information was relevant and what was not. The same is true today. I have no idea if the bad things that are happening in Najaf are more important than the good things happening in the north and south of Iraq. I hear of the attacks on US forces but have no idea if the insurgents are a real threat or just a bunch of no hopers looking for martydom. The kind of big picture reporting that would answer these questions is very much lacking in the media today. Indeed such a task seems more suited to historians rather than journalists. I follow the news closely, read a wide variety of sources and am one of the most intelligent people I know but I really don't know if Iraq is a huge mess or a great success.
The upcoming election will probably be seen as a referendum on Bush and the war in Iraq. Yet most people have even less of an idea than I do about how things are going over there. I don't think the average voter has the time or the inclination to really put together a coherent opinion on most of the pressing issues of today. Thus the issue comes down to who voters trust. That is why the attacks on Bush service in the Air Force reserve are important, and why the Swift Vets ads about events that happened 38 years ago could be so decisive.

RAW Highlight

I thought it was great last night when the King tried to warn Flair against going up to the top turnbuckle during his match with Regal. I love little things like that. An announcer winking at kayfabe like Lawler did last night shows respect to all us Flair marks .

The Source of the NeoCons power

Many theories have sprung up concerning the sudden ascendancy of the neo-conservatives in the Bush White House after 9-11. Most of these theories explain the success of neo-con foreign policy to their skill at skullduggery or that Bush is weak minded and easily influenced. Even normally sober minded pundits seem to buy into these theories. However, the preeminence of the neo-conservative foreign policy has a very simple explanation; there are no credible alternatives to it. Using American diplomatic and military policy to reshape the middle east into a region of stability and democracy has many critics and many of the them make good points. What these critics do not have is a workable alternative and in politics as in poker, something always beats nothing.
During the cold war both sides had distinct foreign policy philosophies and tried to convince the nation of the correctness of their philosophy. The liberals had an accomodationist policy designed to make war less likely and to convince the Soviet Union that we did not have to be enemies. The conservatives had a confrontational foreign policy designed to defeat the Soviet Union and spread America's influence in the world. The critique each party had of the other's policies was not just that they used the wrong methods but that they had the wrong goal. Contrast this with Kerry's criticisms of Bush on foreign policy. He says that Bush is a bumbler and that he could do it better, but he never criticizes the goals of the policy except in a subtle way. That is because Kerry really does not have an alternative policy, he just promises to do it better.
There are two alternatives to the neo-cons democratization policy but they do not have the support and so politicians stay away from articulating them. The first alternative is one with a very long history in America and a good deal of popular support among voters, isolationism. It says that the Middle East is not our problem and we should let them fight it out and then we will buy the oil from whoever wins. It doesn't matter if we buy our oil from an Ayatollah, a dictator, or a president. Thousands or even millions of people dying in a foreign country is a shame but it is not our business and it is not worth one American life to change the lot of foreigners. The problem with this view is that it has almost no following in Washington. One reason is if America does not concern itself with the problems of the world than all those diplomats and world shapers in Washington are out of a job. Another reason is that the for most thoughtful people the lesson of WW2 and the cold war is that isolationism only creates worse problems down the road. Any politician seriously proposing isolationism would never get support from their party and has no hope of implementing that policy.
The other alternative to neo-conservative democratization is the opposite of isolationism, internationalism. This view postulates that security can be found in collective decision making. It says that the UN should handle international affairs and that any action that does not have the UN stamp of approval is invalid. This perspective sees that world as one big European Union, where disputes are settled by rounds of negotiations and peer pressure. America would be just one member among equals and international consensus would be required before action could be taken. This view is very popular in the UN and among more liberal and elitist parts of the government. The problem with this for a politician is that it is wildly unpopular among voters. Anyone articulating this viewpoint forthrightly would be accused of giving a veto to the French and Russians and would not be able to get elected dog catcher.
So with politicians unable to come up with a credible alternative to the neo-conservatives democratization policies all the criticisms will not be able to dent their power and influence, no matter who wins the upcoming election.

Kerry's potential McCain blunder

I recently saw the new Kerry ad blaming Bush for the swift vets' attack ad. It compares the attack on Kerry to the ones on McCain in 2000. The implicit message seems to be that Bush likes to throw mud at war heroes. It seems to me that this is a very risky strategy for Kerry. By setting up McCain as the authority on what is good and proper in a campaign, it runs a risk that McCain could submarine Kerry at the convention. If McCain goes negative against Kerry harshly, Kerry's paean to McCain could lend the charges extra power. McCain could really impact this election, but I think that Kerry is counting on McCain not wanting to sully his reputation with the press by attacking Kerry. That is probably a good bet because it seems that McCain values his own reputation with the press much higher than his party's prospects in November. However, it is a very risky proposition to give a member of the opposition such an opening.

Kerry in Vietnam

Reading http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A21239-2004Aug21.html it appears that the Kerry-Swift Vets dueling will end up just being a he said- she said situation with your politics determining who you believe. However, there is one bit in the article I found very illuminating:

When Kerry signed up to command a Swift boat in the summer of 1968,
he was inspired by the example of his hero, John F. Kennedy, who had commanded the PT-109 patrol boat in the Pacific in World War II. But Kerry had little expectation of seeing serious action. At the time the Swift boats -- or PCFs (patrol craft fast), in Navy jargon -- were largely restricted to coastal patrols. "I didn't really want to get involved in the war," Kerry wrote in a book of war reminiscences published in 1986.
The role of the Swift boats changed dramatically toward the end of 1968, when Adm. Elmo R. Zumwalt Jr., commander of U.S. naval forces in South Vietnam, decided to use them to block Vietcong supply routes through the Mekong Delta. Hundreds of young men such as Kerry, with little combat experience, suddenly found themselves face to face with the enemy.


This seems to provide an insight into a part of Kerry's Vietnam era actions of which I did not previously understand. It is well known that Kerry was anti-war before he signed up and very anti-war after he came home. It seemed strange to me that such a peacenik would volunteer first for the war, and then volunteer again for swift boat duty. Now it all makes sense. Kerry faced the same dilemma as many other politically ambitious young people of that time. How to preserve their political viability while at the same time avoiding dangerous service in Vietnam. Bill Clinton famously tried several different ways to avoid service before he got lucky with his draft lottery number. Most of the future Republican leaders ,Quayle, Cheney, and Bush, seem not to have been too worried about their political futures and more about their own skins. Kerry seems to have found a very clever way out of this dilemma. He enlisted in the Navy confident that most of the danger in Vietnam was to infantry and pilots not to those in ships off the coast. Once in Vietnam he found a way to emulate his hero, JFK, by volunteering for swift boat duty which was the closest think to a PT boat he could find. At this time he could pretend to be JFK without the danger JFK was exposed to. However, his plan backfired when the swift boat tactics were changed to patrol rivers and engage the enemy. He then came up with a new plan. He needed to get out of danger as soon as possible so he came up with the idea of writing up reports and recommending himself for purple hearts every time he got a scratch so he could quickly accumulate three and be sent out of Vietnam. This strategy also ensured that he would be able to run for office later as a war hero with multiple purple hearts. The plan worked like a charm, he got three purple hearts in four months and was back in the US without ever having to spend a minute in the hospital. He has traded on his Vietnam service ever since then with great success and until the recent commercials no one ever had the stones to criticize his service.

What's wrong with Triple H

Like most of the IWC I dislike Triple H and think he gets way too much TV time on Raw. Most of the criticism of him seems to be that he is too much of a politician and that he uses his stroke to keep himself on top and push everyone besides his friends down. I think that is a valid criticism but could be applied to just about everyone in the business who has ever had stroke. I think Sean did it, SCSA did it, Flair did, Dusty did it, Hogan did it, and I could go on and on. Triple H is not the first and won't be the last and I don't like it but I accept it. What I don't like about Triple H is that he has no real gimmick. He is just a tough, angry guy, who is a good wrestler. When he first came to the WWE he had the blue blood gimmick, which I really liked. Then he joined DX, which was fantastic before Sean left and decent after. Since DX broke up, he has just been the generic angry heel. He has no catch phrases, he really shows very little personality. He has kind of stolen Flair's gimmick recently, but has not gone far enough with it. His interviews and promos are long and pointless. He needs a gimmick other than angry guy. He has put on some great matches and been involved in some good angles but he will never go down as a great wrestler unless be comes up with a better gimmick.