Scroll to the bottom of William Safire's column today and find this:
Correction: The Martian division of Sanpickle notes that a NASA rover landed in the Gusev crater on Mars, and not, as I wrote, in the Sleepy Hollow crater or depression. (The whereabouts of Judge Crater remain unknown.)
Is everybody happy now?
Megan McArdle is reading a book she likes, and says we should read it too. Here's a some of what she quotes.
Social psychologists have found that with divisive moral issues, especially those on which liberals and conservatives disagree, all combatants are intuitively certain that they are correct and that their opponents have ugly ulterior motives. They argue out of respect for the social conventin that one should always provide reasons for one's opinions, but when an argument is refuted, they don't change their minds, but work harder to find a replacement argument. . . .The landscape of the sicences of human nature is strewn with these third rails, hot zones, black holes, and Chernobyls. . . Social psychologists have discovered that even in heated ideological battles, common ground can sometimes be found. Each side must acknowlege that the other is arguing out of principle, too, and that they both share certain values and disagree only over which to emphasize in cases where they conflict. Finding such common gound is my goal in the discussions to follow.
I don't know. Wouldn't it just be easier to read what Michael Moore, Al Franken, Ann Coulter, and Rush Limbaugh have to say instead?
I dont' read as much as I used to. But when I do, my interests are more along the lines of this or this. I don't own the second one, but my birthday is coming up in July.
Gregg Easterbrook thinks Richard Clarke is trying to sell a book, and that Clarke's not the only one.
I added him to the blogroll.
Health tip from Australia:
Dr Bischinger said: "With the finger you can get to places you just can't reach with a handkerchief, keeping your nose far cleaner."And eating the dry remains of what you pull out is a great way of strengthening the body's immune system.
The question is, who among us will continue to claim "I never get colds"? From Instapundit.
So I spent most of the day fiddling around with how this place looks and stuff, and added a sitemeter, which provides me with cool graphs of how many folks come by. I was astonished, 'nay astounded at the volume!
![server[1].gif](http://whocanreallysay.com/pics/server[1].gif)
I hereby apologize to all of the miserably poor proof-readers out there.
Earlier today I spell-checked everything I'd posted thus far, and found more than a dozen errors, from plain old misspellings (weasle instead of weasel), to typos (Presiident for President), to cross-cultural flubs (there's no "u" in Al Qaeda and I even hyphenated it once).
I promise to get worse.
Laurence Simon of Amish Tech Support [link finally fixed] stopped by in the comments below to offer a bit of advice. Well thanks, Laurence! This proves I exist.
Now if I can only figure out the blog voodoo that he used to find me.
Is it Blogs 1, NY Times 0? Well the score may be more lop-sided than that and the Times probably hasn't been shut out. But in any case the Times today announced a new corrections policy for their Op-Ed columnists, and it's hard to conclude anything but that the policy directly results from criticism of it's columnists in the blogosphere. (I'm not particularly fond of the new word, "blogosphere". It sounds pretentious and well, made up. But it's better than blogiverse -- blog + universe -- so I guess I'm stuck. Anyway . . . .)
Daniel Okrent joined the paper as its Public Advocate after last year's Jason Blair scandal, and in today's edition Okrent does a good job of even handedly exposing the problem with the Times's prior policy (there was none) on correcting factual errors in opinion columns. A few weeks back a Times lawyer tried to drop a 16 ton weight on Robert Cox of The National Debate for his parody of a non-existent Times Corrections page for its columnists. With Okrent's piece today, the book on complaints about the failure to correct factual misstatements by columnists is closed and put back on the shelf (at least until we finish reading the rest of today's paper?)
But it was a good read. My favorite chapters dealt with carving up quotations to strip them of their context, thereby creating a whole new meaning. Scroll to the bottom of the parody corrections page and you'll see how last year Maureen Dowd converted a statement by President Bush that captured or killed Al Qaeda members were "not a problem anymore" into a quote that meant all of Al Qaeda was not a problem anymore. Spinsanity dissected not only how Dowd created a meaning that didn't exist but also how that meaning was picked up by CNN, MSNBC, and newspapers around the world.
It is difficult to escape the fact that this change in policy was driven by the internet in general and blogs in particular. In the past, all one could do is send off a letter to the editor. Today, folks can have a big fat loud long distance conversation about it, and that conversation can matter.
Still and fair enough, Jeff Jarvis has a cautionary note to add about the entire episode:
And Okrent says this about columnists in today's column:I sometimes think opinion columns ought to carry a warning: "The following is solely the opinion of the author, supported by data I alone have chosen to include. Live with it." Opinion is inherently unfair. The same could be put over the door of many if not most weblogs. But the real question is how often it should be used over news reporting. Yup, that's the real question.
"But in these times, we can't ignore anything. We want to take the appropriate measures," he said.
This link takes you to Amish Tech Support, one of the more clever blog names in my book. Laurence Simon runs the place, which includes a well run Dead Pool, for those of you who like to place bets on when the next lot of agricultural real estate will be purchased.
I was slightly disappointed to find out I had to manually edit the main template of this blog in order to begin placing links in my blogroll. Maybe I'm missing something, but there's so much cool stuff Movable Type does I figured it would be easier.
Anyway, for now I put up two rather obvious (for me) links, to Instapundit and the Volokh Conspiracy. (No links here -- look over on the left). Actually, the first blog I ever read was Andrew Sullivan's. I'm not sure when it was, but what I am sure of is that I didn't "get" that there was anything unique about the format. I went back now and then, but not much.
Then I found myself with a lot of time on my hands (I either won the lottery or got laid off -- which do you think?) in August 2002, and that's when I found Instapundit via an article in the NY Times. He's relatively unique among political bloggers in that he doesn't actually write much to get his points across. Sometimes, I think, that works to his disadvantage because one-liner's can be read more than one way. But mostly he's a link rich source and unlike many political bloggers, he'll link to the opposition not only to disagree but also when he thinks they're right.
Eugene Volokh is a law professor (as is Instapundit's Glenn Reynolds), and what I really enjoy about his writing is that he does it so well, and yet so dispassionately. I don't have links handy as examples, but regardless of the contentiousness of the issue, he's persuasive without being off-putting or insulting. There's a humility to it. And on the rare occasion when he pulls a dagger, it makes his writing all the more effective.
I read the blog mostly for Eugene's stuff, but this is one of the more prolific co-blogger blogs on the net, and I read most of the stuff on the site daily. Do you care? Should you? Or better yet, would you?
More later. Onion soup needs tending to.
I'm pretty much done with Mr. Clarke for now I guess (although I'm emailing my sea anchor to see if I can't get more slack in the line). David Brooks in the today's NY Times summarizes it all pretty well.
There's plenty of blame to go around. Clarke deserves blame for his shrill partisanship. The media deserve blame for neglecting the commission reports (The Times is an honorable exception). Most important, the administration deserves blame. Instead of focusing on the substantive commission reports and treating Clarke with the back of its hand, the Bush administration got right in the mud with him.Meanwhile, actual policy matters get tossed about in the roiling seas. Though we never really had a discussion about it, now everybody is embracing pre-emptive action against potential terrorist threats.
This has not been a good week for American politics. It's been another week (the 4,000th in a row, I believe) in which serious issues were treated as a soap opera. If you want to live the soap opera, buy Clarke's book. If you want something serious, read the commission reports. You'll find them at www.9-11commission.gov.
I used to be a trial lawyer of sorts. I came close, but never had a jury trial. I tried many non-jury trials, and helped out with others. Some were won, some were lost. One thing I learned from it was to avoid bad arguments, and one form of those is an argument that overreaches by embellishing the facts, especially to the point of lying (which is bad for lawyers in any case).
It seems to me that most advocacy groups would do well to learn that argument, but they aren't in the realm of mere advocacy -- they market their ideas as well, and there's a real difference.
So this might be good marketing, but it's terrible advocacy.
Last month it appeared I might have to learn Visio and flowcharting techniques to complete a presentation at work. My friend Glenn was very helpful in providing me with some resources to get up to speed. I got through the presentation without having to use a flow chart, but here was my practice effort. It was criticized for, among other things, acknowledging that some people drink beer in cars, which is illegal. Fair enough.
So now via Wonkette, I run across another flowchart, and I'm wondering -- what's going on with that connection between "Agree enthusiastically" and "Stonewall"?
I cannot avoid the urge to re-write. Haven't you ever written something of any length, put it down for years, and then gone back to re-read it? Don't you find words and sentences that make you cringe?
That's the way I feel, and length and years need not be involved. In a vain and perhaps quixotic attempt at clarity of thought and fidelity to standard American English Usage, I've edited (alright, taken another stab at) the first paragraph of yesterday's It's a Two Way Street.
I guess I'm not prone to write much later at night. But this is from near the conclusion of an excellent article, all of which is worth reading. It's even got John Kerry's favorite policy concept: nuance.
Whatever the dissembling from officials seeking justification for an invasion of Iraq?and there is no doubt the effort was improperly managed thanks, in part, to harshly contending agendas within the Bush administration?the diagnosis was a correct one. Sept. 11 went beyond Al Qaeda and reflected a more fundamental problem in the Arab world: the existence of regimes allowing or directing resentment toward the outside, particularly against the West, to cover up for their own asphyxiation of liberties.
Peter Feaver in the WaPo writes a very interesting piece he calls The Clinton Mind-Set. I generally agree with what he writes, but think there's something unsaid that ought to be out in the open. While it's true that Clinton didn't take on Al Qaeda, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, and while it's true one of the reasons for this is that there was no political support for these actions, what's also true is that there was no Republican support for such actions either. Indeed, as I posted below, it was exactly the opposite.
What got in the way of bigger picture thinking on the part of the Republicans in 1998 is the same thing getting in the way of the Democrats today: political self-interest. Please pay careful attention to the conventions this summer for the many references from the podiums to this point.
From Greg Easterbrook, of TMQ fame:
So as you continue to listen to the outpouring off hindsight, just remember that people protested when Bill Clinton tried to stop bin Laden early, and remember that many of the same people today defending the invasion of Iraq roundly criticized prior action against the same country.
Read the whole thing.
My friend in the comments to Email, I get Email said he hoped I'd get into this from Newsweek (I couldn't find a link):
March 29 issue - It was the day after 9/11, and President Bush, like many Americans, was looking for someone to bomb. Wandering into the White House Situation Room, the president pulled aside Richard Clarke, the counterterrorism chief of the national-security staff who had been held over from the Clinton years. According to Clarke, Bush asked: was Iraq responsible for the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington? Bush wanted the FBI and CIA to hunt for any evidence that pointed to Iraqi strongman Saddam Hussein. Clarke recalls that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was also looking for a justification to bomb Iraq. Soon after the 9/11 attacks, Rumsfeld was arguing at a cabinet meeting that Afghanistan, home of Osama bin Laden's terrorist camps, did not offer "enough good targets." "We should do Iraq," Rumsfeld urged.
This is offered to the public as some sort of telling insight. After all, goes the notion (it doesn't actually rise to the level of an argument so I'll call it that), the Iraq War was clearly a mistake and we need to know how we got ourselves into it. And so we've had first, Paul O'Neill and now Richard Clarke, offering pieces of the puzzle they got to see, and drawing grand conclusions. "We got into Iraq", the notion goes, "because it was a fixation from the outset. After all, there are no WMD, so why invade Iraq? It must be a result of this out of whack secret pre-conception, the fundamental truth of which we're only hearing now."
The only problem with the notion is that it ignores everything else about how we got to where we are today. It ignores the 10+ years of history dealing with Iraq. It ignores the evident dangers the Clinton Administration saw in Iraq. It ignores how 9/11 changed U.S. foreign policy. It ignores the total absence of war planning to invade Iraq until mid to late 2002. But it does have the saving grace of impugning the motives of Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld.
In his testimony today Clarke repeated his claims that Bush failed to make Al Qaeda a "top priority". Compare this with what Clarke told reporters in a private briefing in 2002 (via Instapundit). But today Clarke told the 9/11 Commission that he was "spinning" when he said made those comments. And he went on to say that his statements now are as strong as they are because he truly believes the War in Iraq is a bad move in the overall War on Terror.
Well maybe that's so -- I disagree but there are arguments on the other side. But what does that have to do with whether Bush was strong enough against Al Qaeda before 9/11? Was what Clarke said in 2002 an outright lie? If not, how does it square with what's he's saying today, that Al Qaeda was a larger priority for Clinton than for Bush? Maybe that's deep in the transcripts of today's hearing, but I'm not holding my breath. The coverage of his book doesn't reconcile the inconsistencies.
So here we have a guy who is criticizing what happened before 9/11 because he doesn't like what's happened after 9/11, who didn't have the access before 9/11 that he had with the Clinton Administration in any case, and all of it contrary to what he said in 2002. Hey, I think he's on to something!
There's at least one person reading this blog at the moment, and one of them is a Beatles fan. Read this, and then the full article linked there.
I'm linking again [link fixed] to the Volokh Conspiracy (this time Jacob Levy), one of my favorite blogs (and my to do list includes adding a blog roll -- maybe over the weekend I'll put it together with a post on what I like and think about them). Levy links to this from Daniel Drezner, who also makes my list.
Reading blogs, in a sense, is like reading movie reviews. You don't have to like a reviewer's opinions about a movie to come back for her next review. After reading enough of them, you get an understanding of where she's coming from and the degree to which you'll share the experience. If she always trashes movies you like, well now you know how to find movies you like, right? And if she's always spot on, you'll look forward to the show.
Drezner and the folks at Volokh are far more often than not, spot on.
I am unmoved to dry eyes. On today's Op-Ed page of the NY Times, Daniel Benjamin says the planned Freedom Tower, to be built at the WTC site, is a bad idea because we'll simply be inviting another attack:
The total amount of energy released by the two 767's that struck the Twin Towers equaled that of a tactical nuclear weapon ? almost a quarter of a kiloton. In 2006, two years before Freedom Tower is scheduled to open, a new generation of aircraft, led by the Airbus A380, will begin entering service in the world's airlines. The A380 will carry almost 82,000 gallons of fuel, more than three times as much as a 767. One hardly needs to do the math.Although there have been great strides in improving security in commercial aviation, perfect safety is unattainable. Intelligence gathering has also improved, but no one can promise that all future conspiracies will be discovered and disrupted. Will Air Force fighters constantly patrol, at astronomical cost, the approaches to the Freedom Tower? If they do, are we certain that the government will be prepared to shoot down a suspicious plane on a second's notice?
Did this guy get a vote in Madrid last week?
I generally support the War in Iraq, in part because in many ways it demonstrates real leadership on Bush's part. But Randy Barnett is right -- there's a gaping hole in that leadership as well.
Well, actually, no. I'm in the process of setting up an email account for the blog but it isn't done yet. No, the email I got is to my personal account, and came from one of the instigators mentioned in my first post below. He writes:
At least you?re being topical, weighing in on the Richard Clarke thing (although I believe that you and I pretty much disagree on it all). You took the tack that most of the conservative commentators are taking?just being dismissive of it. Probably safest for G.W., but ultimately disappointing for someone like me looking for a more in-depth analysis.
Now this is the same guy -- well, a great friend, actually -- who wrote this to encourage me to start this blog:
Your writing is the perfect mix of cleverness, humor, real information, total BS, and brilliant analysis. People will be hanging on your every word.
So here's some cleverness, humor, real info, total BS, and brilliant analysis: What the hell do you expect, the Spanish Inquisition???? (In case you're keeping score, that was slightly clever and almost funny). The ink is barely dry on the damn book and I'm supposed to provide instant analysis? Well, actually, yes, that's what I gave and guess what? Comparing my instant analysis to real analysis is like comparing instant coffee to real coffee. In fact, I think that's pretty much true for everyone's instant analysis.
But seriously, at this point all anyone can do is take the snippets of the book fed to the world by 60 Minutes on Sunday, plus whatever the Monday papers might add, and then what -- come to some kind of conclusion about exactly what? All I could comment on is the apparent relationship Clarke had to the rest of the Administration, and it seems to me what he's complaining about is that no one listened to him. From that he seems to conclude, again based only on what we've heard, that since no one listened to him, then Al Qaeda must have been ignored. But he wasn't at the President's daily briefings, so what the hell does he know? Again, having not read the book, I don't know what he doesn't know, and I'm going to stop there before I start to sound like Donald Rumsfeld.
What we do know is that a) he was the anti-terror czar during Al Qaeda's ramp up in the 90's and b) whatever his thoughts were on stopping them didn't work, or were disregarded and never put into action. Either way, neither looks good. And we know he was "demoted", and that he teaches a course now at Harvard with Rand Beers, an old colleague, who's serving on the Kerry Campaign as the National Security/Homeland Security Issue Coordinator.
Of course, for all we know Clarke is 100% correct on everything in the book that none of us has read yet. But given what we know, and that we're in the middle of a Presidential campaign, and that the Democrats would like nothing more than to win the election to get themselves out from underneath another vote on Iraq that they don't like (in '91 many Dems were embarrassed to have voted against the war, now they're embarrassed to have voted for it), I have to say the entire episode leaves me decidedly unimpressed.
Did I get them all? The BS? The brilliant analysis too?
Here.
What to make of Richard Clarke, the former top anti-terrorism official under the Clinton Administration, out with a new book and pumping it on 60 Minutes last night?
Clarke said:
"Frankly," he said, "I find it outrageous that the president is running for re-election on the grounds that he's done such great things about terrorism. He ignored it. He ignored terrorism for months, when maybe we could have done something to stop 9/11. Maybe. We'll never know." Clarke went on to say, "I think he's done a terrible job on the war against terrorism."
Well here's what I make of it: the guy who worked for years as the top anti-terrorist guy under President Clinton, and with few if any successes to his credit, now claims that in 8 months Bush "may" have done something to stop it, but didn't.
Well that seems about right to me. I'd turn to him first for how to combat terrorists, just as I'd turn to Harold Stassen if I (really) wanted to figure out how to run for President, Marv Levy or Bud Grant if I wanted to win a Super Bowl, or the geniuses who came up with New Coke to . . . well, you get the idea.
Seriously, what exactly was not done, that should have been done? I mean, he's in the position to know, right? That's why he's writing the book, right? That's why 60 Minutes gave him time on the show, right? Well, not so right there -- it seems Viacom owns the publisher of the book, and 60 Minutes as well.
What mostly strikes me about Clarke (and Paul O'Neill) is that here are two guys who were either never in the loop or were taken out of it, who now claim that those in the loop didn't know what they were talking about, what they were doing, where they were going, etc. Well maybe that's so. But if it is, I'd not expect to learn it from those that weren't there to know it in the first place.
Perhaps the closest thing to a formal Bush administration response is here, and it doesn't seem to me to be a description of an effort that Clarke was a part of.
Some other day perhaps I'll write about why I supported (and still support) the War on Terrorism, which includes a War in Iraq. Until I do, let's just say that I think much of the criticism about the Iraq War stems from two things: 1) that Bush's political opponents (and there's nothing wrong with being a political opponent, generally) will never acknowledge his legitimacy as President after Florida (and all that); and 2) there is a fundamental disagreement about the scope and breadth of the War on Terrorism that is rarely discussed. Instead we're left with proxies to those discussions, such as "Bush lied, people died", the latest book (soon to be previewed on 60 Minutes!), and what not.
When Charles Foster Kane took control of his first newspaper in Citizen Kane he wrote a "Statement of Principles". By the end of the movie his principles lay in tatters not seen since I last cleaned out my sock drawer some twenty years ago.
But there are few principles to blogging as far as I can tell. Don't make stuff up is a pretty good principle, although Scott Ott, and others, do that all the time to great effect. Be personal is another good principle, but lately every candidate for President seems to think that because they have a blog they are, somehow, being personal.
Well I'm not as funny as Ott and I'm not a candidate for President, and the blogs for those that are, are no more blogs than Ice Cream Pizza or Chocolate Apple Martinis are either pizza or martinis.
So these are my principles: don't lie, and be personal.
Tatters await. Let's see -- the sock drawer cleanup happened about 5 years ago, and I'm a Double SECRET candidate for President. I think that covers it.
Beyond that I have no idea where this will lead, because I don't write quickly, I'm a miserably poor proof-reader, and I don't plan to spend all day typing into this pitifully small Moveable Type window. But the title of this blog was chosen specifically to allow me to weasel out of whatever I like. So who can really say?
The human gestation period is about nine months. The gestation period of a blog, or at least this one, was about 19 months, that being how long I've been reading blogs and more or less how long I've been told "You should have your own blog!"
So to those who encouraged me, I hope you're happy. Just remember: It's your fault.
