There is a danger in overestimating the competence of the Administration, thinking that the permanent bureaucracy will do the bidding of their political masters. The color-coded system is a pointless joke, in terms of making us more secure. But it’s not supposed to make us more secure—it’s supposed to save senior civil service jobs in case of a successful attack.

This is much sadder, and in a way less comforting than The Awe-Inspiring Bush-Cheney-Rove Machine Did It to Scare Us. If the Evil Empire did it, then the Evil Empire is at least powerful, and organized, and could maybe protect us if they felt like it. Homeland Security did it to Cover Their Asses. When you are covering your ass, you are considering what happens if you fail. Which is very, very close to planning to fail.

I’ve blogged about why the August 8 Presidential Daily Briefing flak is overblown. (Sometime I’ll fisk the PDB, but not right now.) Shorthand—There is Always a Korlian Death Cruiser. There are always threats on the horizon and potential threats to the US. Post-9/11, every time the NSA intercepts an inflammatory email, there is as much cause to panic, and as much specific information, as was in the PDB. And, post-9/11, “Who could have predicted this?” is not going to be enough to save anyone’s job. The Orange Alert means that “the government heard something somewhere about an attack, real or imagined, at some time in the near future in some part of the US.” If prevention fails and the attack comes off, Don’t Blame Us—We Raised the Threat Level.

The threat level was “white noise” because There is Always a Korlian Death Cruiser. Homeland Security “raised the threat level” every time something happened, or might have happened. I’m sure it was based on real information. But, in intelligence, even “real information” is sometimes wrong or useless. Where the movie’s MIB were wrong is in estimating human psychology. In the MIB world, if the existence of the MIB and the aliens did become public knowledge, then humanity would not panic. OK, they would panic in the short term, but only until they got used to the idea of aliens are here, the MIB exist, and the crazies were right. They wouldn’t be paralyzed with fear of the Korlian Death Cruiser or of the Andromeda Plague. Human psychology adapts and copes. People would follow the interstellar news obsessively for a while, until they didn’t. Ordinary folks would get used to it, just like people during the Cold War got used to the threat of nuclear annihilation. Most people didn’t stay up all night reading Kremlin memos to determine if they would drop the bomb or not. Either they will, and I can’t stop them, or they won’t, and then I’ve got to get up in the morning and go to work.

Topics to argue about. Let's have the Esteemed Audience pick five and we'll go from there.

1. Given the information available at the time, Bush should have done something differently about terrorism in the first eight months of his Administration.

2. Islamic terrorism is a problem that cannot be substantially reduced but only prevented and kept at a manageable level. Any project whose aim is the radical transformation of the Middle East is either doomed to fail or to make matters worse.

3. Kerry’s war statements and votes have displayed a consistent framework, responding differently to different circumstances; or have been driven by political expediency.

4. Kerry’s Vietnam War and antiwar record gives useful information as to whether he would have been a good Commander-in-Chief fighting against the global jihad. (This, while still as much fun as a root canal, says important things about the anti-Vietnam
war left and American national security policy.)

5. Social Security reform.

6. After 9/11, the Administration would have been unwise to rely on the CIA to confirm the existence of threats before acting.

7. In 2002, Saddam was/was not a significant threat.

8. Our attempt to create democracy in Iraq while under American military protection is doomed to failure.

9. If the Clinton-Gore Administration had remained in power, boy howdy they were just about to get around to taking care of Osama.

10. The Administration is usually not as in control of the federal bureaucracy as many, especially conspiratorialists, assume. (RE: Orange Alerts)

11. Randy Orton should immediately change his theme music to a remix of Kid Rock’s “[I Want to be a] Cowboy”, as it would fit perfectly both with his father’s legacy and his own position as the young, arrogant chosen one destined to dominate the business. (If you don't believe me, ask him.)

Something that both me and my Esteemed Audience can both be horrified by.

http://abcnews.go.com/WNT/Investigation/story?id=1383832&CMP=OTC-RSSFeeds0312

Infuriating quotes:

Officials said a 50-year-old Egyptian man was stopped a week ago at New York's John F. Kennedy Airport. Sources said he had a suspicious pair of shoes that tested positive five times for the explosive substance TATP on the interior of his shoes between the heel and sole.

Three paragraphs later:

After holding him overnight, airport security in New York released him. The FBI was notified after he was released and put out a nationwide alert. FBI officials confirmed that the man's story was true and that he was not a threat.

The FBI was notified after he was released? After he was released? AFTER he was friggin RELEASED? He was held overnight, and no one had time to contact the FBI?

And exactly what was this joker's story about how explosives got between the heel and sole of his shoes? How does that happen innocently?

I mean, I don't think I'm stupid. I know that the Homeland Security Department is a massive boondoggle, a bureaucratic shuffle to make it look like someone is doing something. I know that the TSA is a massive waste of government resources and people's time. Our airport security problem was pretty much fixed by the time the plane in Pennsylvania went down--people figured out that a successful hijacking meant a death sentence, not a 1970's-style hostage ordeal. We didn't need any fancy Homeland Security types to stop the original shoe-bomber--the passengers and crew beat the living hell out of him and hogtied him.

But Jesus Tapdancing Christ, an Egyptian national with explosives in his shoes is detained and RELEASED? And they couldn't even hold him until someone at the FBI could pick up the phone? Or, to put that another way, isn't there anyone at the FBI at night to answer the phone?

I have a suggestion to my audience. I submit that the Listen to Franken/Scrawl notes/Blog/Comment/Respond to 25 different posts and growing is about to get completely out of control. I suggest that my audience select 5 or 10 topics to go back and forth on. If we reach resolution on a few, then maybe move on to others.

I suggest we set aside a few things as resolved.

Rove's campaign tactics are very, very sleazy. Spreading lies about your opponent in a way that indicates it wasn't you spreading them is indefensible. We can still argue about A) Whether certain groups were campaign surrogates and B) Whether a specific charge is in fact a lie.

Bush in 2004 didn't win a mandate for anything except continuing his policies in the War on Terror. His razor-thin majority was and is held together by the War on Terror and pretty much nothing else.

Democrats have a large and growing political problem with churchgoing white people.

In 2001 (and maybe still), the Bush Administration foreign policy team didn't respect the Clinton foreign policy team.

The Clinton foreign policy team didn't say nearly as much about terrorism before 9/11 as they now claim to have said/known.

If we can set those five item aside, we can pick five items of disagreement, and start arguing productively. Or at least more productively.

This isn't working. I'm skimming the posts, and the blog displays symptoms of borderline schizophrenia--this is the Moulin Rouge of blogging. The method of listening to book on CD, scrawling notes while at stoplights (or while on a straightaway) and then frantically blogging and trying to get through a half-hour's notes in before I get in the car again and take another page of notes on a half-hour ride is not working. It creates an incredibly chaotic read, where the reader is getting a footnoted transcript of my half of a not-very-structured conversation.

I might have to get a copy of the actual book, and drastically reduce the breakneck pace. 15 pages in a week produced under these conditions is incomprehensible. I have printed out the blog, and will reorganize some bits into longer, more coherent formats.

I actually fell asleep in front of the computer last night, so my bit on Kerry, Miller and the weapons systems didn't make much sense. In Kerry's first Senate campaign, he opposed every major weapons system in the Reagan buildup--or to be concise he opposed the Reagan buildup. Kerry was a member and a leader of the nuclear-freeze, pro-Sandinista, Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador left, trying to make sure that American foreign policy in Central America would fail just as it had in Southeast Asia, and Communist dictatorships sprout in Nicaragua and El Salvador just as they had in Vietnam and Cambodia. (This is overstated by about 20%.)

BArak Obama is OK by just about everyone. Phony robocalls are bad. (Political dirty tricks are a very old story. They're either roguishly clever or should be felonies, depending on whether they're played on you or not.)

For any abortion legislation, the "exception for the health of the mother" has been a huge loophole that negates the ban. "Health" gets re-read to mean mental health, and having a baby you don't want is stressful, which is bad for your mental health. Every player in the game knows this.

The question of political churches is real. One of Clinton's (very white) aides in 1992, when asked their religion, said, "I don't know, I guess AME Zionist lately." No one in REpublicanland wants to deal with the $#!+storm of trying to take away a black church's tax exemption, but they want to level the playing field. As a heathen arch-infidel, I'm not happy about it, but that's the state of play.

As they said, the Roman Catholic church is not a democracy, never has been. [Esoteric qualifiers about early Church Councils deleted] As for the claim that this has never been done before, BS. This pops up all the time in the Northeast.

As for Casey, Begala is as shameless a hack as Rove, but the account sounds plausible. {PAuse to Google} The New Republic is not a hack organ. Research rules. For what it's worth, there are more visible pro-choice Republicans than pro-life Democrats, but I think that local factors explain that. (Republican leaders in California and New York are automatically national figures without having to run a southern, conservative Christian gauntlet.)

I'm sympathetic to three strikes and you're out marriage. Pennsylvania archconservative Senator Rick Santorum might be, too.

W's flip-flops. This is an excellent point, and if the Democrats had deployed this during the campaign, it would have helped. (Provided that they had a different candidate, one without Kerry's and Clinton's addiction to playing both sides of every street.)

Franken asking for Oxycontin for the road was funny.

Democrats really don't have to run many negative ads—their watercarriers in the media pick up their talking points well enough that the Democrats don't have to pay.

When Kerry said "We have to get back to where terrorism is a nuisance" he did reveal a sharp distinction between himself and Bush (and most of the American political class.) Most of the American political class sees the war on terrorism, and thus Islamic terrorism, as something that will eventually end. Thus they want to fight an actual war, with tanks and bombs and enemy states, etc. Kerry says that terrorism requires a law enforcement approach, which is exactly the approach that didn't work in the 1990's. Indicting Bin Laden in 1998 didn't do much. Special Forces chasing him around the Afghan-Pakistani border have done more to limit his effectiveness than any indictment. One analogy would be to a health complaint—is Islamic terrorism more like a cancer or like an ulcer?

Political conventional wisdom is that swing voters like nice and react badly to shows of "meanness." This is what doomed the impeachment of Clinton. After Dean's flameout, the Democrats didn't want a mirror image of Pat Buchanan's 1992 "culture wars" speech.

Kerry did vote to kill most of the weapons programs on Miller's list. In 1984, running for Senate he pledged to kill them.

Trying to enable comments.................

The infamous $87 Billion which Kerry voted for before he voted against it.

You can't say "I don't oppose A. I only oppose it if (impossible) condition B is not met." In reality, or as the old Marxists used to say objectively, you oppose A. You could say that Bush, in threatening to veto the Iraq appropriation if it was linked to tax cuts, took both our military and our economic future hostage. I won't even argue that that's an especially unfair thing to say. But Kerry, once his amendment failed, decided to take the US military in Iraq hostage to his opposition to Bush's tax cuts.

Or, even more unkindly, you could say that Kerry is a spineless weed who shifts with every wind, bowing to a pro-Bush, pro-war wind in 2002 and then bowing to a pro-Dean, anti-war wind in 2003.

If you google "Hannity and fisting" you deserve whatever you get.

Kerry on the Patriot Act. This is actually an example of a non-flip-flop--in this speech Kerry takes responsibility for his vote, despite its flaws, and suggests a way to fix it. (BTW, I highly suspect that Kerry's statement about the Patriot Act being abused by Bush and Ashcroft is BS. The most hyped provisions haven't been actually used. I am sure that some prosecutors have used Patriot Act provisions as convenient tools in non-terrorism cases, though.) Here, Kerry doesn't try to play both sides at once.

Disc 3 Begins.

The MainStream Media never treated the Swift Boat attacks as a he said/she said issue. The MSM stayed true to the line that the SBVT charges were all 100% unsubstantiated, groundless lies. In fact, some of the charges (Christmas in Cambodia) turned out to be true, some false, some impossible to determine with certainty.

Franken watches too much Fox News Channel.

The German/Jewish bit was funny.

Longer note--the reason that the Swift Boat attacks attained such prominence was that Vietnam and Vietnam Veterans Against the War is Kerry's entire resume. In twenty years in the Senate, there was no Kerry-PAckwood Act, no Nunn-Kerry Bill, etc. In 2004, Kerry campaigned on the plank that he was a war hero, and his old Swift Boat crew backed him up. That opened him to the counterargument that the other Swift Boat commanders, the previous and next commander of his boat, etc. thought he was a glory-hound out to get as many medals as he could as quickly as possible so as to get back home and continue emulating his hero, initials JFK, who parlayed his medals into a political career which you might remember. Overall relevance of the SBVT charges (even the true ones) to 2004: 2. Relevance of the charges to KErry's campaign themes 7-8. As Franken said, the Democrats brilliantly made their convention theme "Reliving the Vietnam War." Kerry led with his chin here, and the Swifties handed him his head. (FWIW, the Bush-Rove '04 operation treated the Swifties as radioactive, which is probably one reason that the MSM didn't bother to investigate--their designated Republican contacts didn't push them at all. The campaign did not want time spent on discussions of Kerry's Vietnam record. Shooting a naked, wounded VC in the back still beats flying jets in Texas. The campaign wanted "I voted for it before I voted against it" windsurfing footage, and Kerry speaking 24/7.)

I didn't know Rove had reached any lower than using McCain's adopted Bangladeshi daughter. But I'm not surprised.

Kerry usually has 3 Iraq positions per sentence, never mind six since 9/11. "We should have gotten our allies on board"--the French were on Saddam's payroll. They haven't been on board since 1996 when they pulled out of enforcing the no-fly zones. "We should have given inspectors more time"--they wouldn't have proven anything, and the longer we maintained that mobilization, the more time we give Saddam to strike convenient concentrations of US troops in Kuwait with his chemical weapons. (Remember, nobody knew he was bluffing then). And, if you're position is that you got played by George W. Chimpy McHitler Halliburton Bush as your guys call him, you're disqualified from any national office where you have to play poker with the big boys--dictators have fifty to eighty years experience in hoodwinking democratic leaders.

You vote, and you take responsibility for the vote. There's no voting with fingers crossed. You're either on the Yes side or the No side. And the Defense of Marriage Act was a gay marriage vote. Vote however you want, for whatever reason you want, but you voted how you voted. Why? Because politicians can always come up with reasons afterwards why they didn't mean that vote back then. There's a phrase, "Stand up and be counted." That's a politician's job, especially a backbencher like Kerry.

Kerry has always wanted to have it both ways. He wanted political credit for his medals to show off during campaigns, and he wanted the attention he got by throwing medals in the Reflecting Pool. He made his political career with Vietnam Veterans Against the War, but he wanted to run for President as the Good Soldier, Reporting for Duty. He voted for the war because the war was popular, and then voted against the $87 billion because Dean was creaming him in the polls.

Some quick notes. Let's do this Larry King Style. Upon review, let's not. Carrage returns are Mr. Eyeball's friend.

Bush used 9/11 in all kinds of debates, but is it that unreasonable that 9/11 would change the cost-benefit calculus for the Patriot Act, or drilling in ANWR?...

You can fill hours and pages with quotes from Bush 41 cabinet officials about how it would have been a bad idea to march to Baghdad and finish Saddam. Of course, they all thought that he would stop being a problem when some ambitious general put a bullet in his politically weakened skull. That didn't happen, and he became the poster boy (together with Somalia) for the idea that America is soft....

Powell and Rice in early 2001 said that Saddam was under control, no longer a threat, that the sanctions were working. This was before we found out that Saddam had bribed Baron Sevan, head of the UN Oil for Food program, among hundreds of others, so Saddam could import pretty much whatever he could slip past the CIA...

I have a note here that just says Iraq-al Qaeda. Probably about conflation of Iraq and Al-Qaeda. Bush did overstate the connection when he said that there was no difference. W led with his chin, and Kerry let him have it. This note probably also refers to the Douglas Feith-Weekly Standard "Case Closed" memo. That's a longer rant, that I will address at length at some point.

I have a note that says IAEA worthless. Not sure why I wrote that, in terms of what Franken was talking about that I was responding too, but I'll just make the general point that the IAEA has proven to be a failure at preventing determined countries from acquiring nuclear weapons. North Korea and Pakistan have become nuclear weapons states or close enough while within the IAEA, and Iran either has or will. Iraq would have within the 1990s if not for the Gulf War. So I probably meant to write about how, post-9/11, the Bushes were not willing to take UNSCOM's word that Saddam's nuclear program was gone.

Seeking uranium from Africa. Just to start, and not to finish, but let's go with what Ambassador Joe Wilson told the CIA, according to NAtional REview, who based this on the Senate Intelligence Committee, and relied heavily on an article by the Washington Posts' Susan Schmidt.

A former prime minister of Niger, Ibrahim Assane Mayaki, told Wilson that in
June 1999, a businessman approached him, insisting that he meet with an Iraqi
delegation to discuss "expanding commercial relations." Mayaki, knowing how few commodities for export are produced by impoverished Niger, interpreted that to mean that Saddam was seeking uranium.

Another former government official told Wilson that Iran had tried to buy 400 tons of uranium in 1998. That's the same year that Saddam forced the weapons inspectors to leave Iraq. Could the former official have meant Iraq rather than Iran? If someone were to try to connect those dots, what picture might emerge?Schmidt adds that the Senate panel was alarmed to find that the CIA never "fully investigated possible efforts by Iraq to buy uranium from Niger destined for Iraq and stored in a warehouse in Benin."

http://www.nationalreview.com/may/may200407121105.asp

The polls showing large numbers of Americans believing that Saddam Hussein was "directly linked to 9/11" are mostly an example of the limitations of multiple choice polling. (Personally, I believe that a Middle Eastern link to the 2001 anthrax attacks is highly probably.) Most Americans know that Hussein had been a long-term supporter of terrorists, had been a long-term enemy of the United States, and knew that al-Qaeda were terrorists and enemies of the United States. There's easily enough basis for an alliance there. So, let's say you believe that IRaq and al-Qaeda had worked together periodically, say on a chemical weapons factory in the Sudan which Clinton blew up in 1998. Post 9/11, that's enough to justify invading. But that's not a choice on the menu for "direct link to 9/11." So you say that a direct Iraq-9/11 link is "somewhat likely."

Not to mention that the CIA can't find its ass with both hands and a map, so if there were a link, the CIA wouldn't know about it anyway. Best to just take out ALL of our enemies, Godfather style.

World Press. Franken cites a British intelligence conclusion that there was no operational relationship (or something, it was Friday and today is Sunday) and goes through a set of accents for foreign papers. What struck me was that, except for Xinhua newswire, none of them were very prominent foreign papers. So I wasn't nearly as surprised as Franken expected that the only US outlets to pick it up were the Village Voice and LA Weekly.

Libya. Y'know what, I don't care what disgruntled State Department hack Floyd Leverett has to say. Cause this is what Muammar Qadaffi had to say :

A spokesman for Mr Berlusconi said the prime minister had been telephoned
recently by Col Gaddafi of Libya, who said: "I will do whatever the Americans
want, because I saw what happened in Iraq, and I was afraid."

Afraid of the Cowboy, baby. (BTW, Orton should change his theme music to a remix of Kid Rock's Cowboy ASAP.) Memo to Leverett: Dictators will jerk the US State Department around forever if they don't think you're this close to going Manuel Noriega on their ass.

"If America Wavers" W has a point here. A major part of America's problem in the Islamic world is that they think we don't have the balls to fight, bleed and win. They give the litany--in Beirut, we ran. In Somalia, we ran. In Kuwait, we didn't have the courage to go to Baghdad. Dozens of terrorist attacks since the 1970's, and we did next to nothing. Americans are too weak and effeminate to fight and win, too enervated by MTV and material comfort. If Bush doesn't do something about Iran's nuclear program, we're screwed.

Kerry's "Unflagging Support for Our Troops." http://www.richmond.edu/~ebolt/history398/JohnKerryTestimony.html

"Razed villages in a manner reminiscent of Jenghis Khan." How's that for support. It emerged upon investigation that most of the witnesses at the Winter Soldier Investigation, and all of the ones with the best atrocity stories, had not actually been to Vietnam. (Some were using the identities of actual Vietnam veterans, who later denied both the stories and their presence in Detroit.)

Swift Boat press treatment. I'll just say that, with the exception of Kerry's hometown Boston papers, no mainstream media outlet particularly investigated the Swift Boat Vet's charges. Rightwing media did prove one Kerry lie--that he participated in secret missions in Cambodia in 1968. (Folllowing is an Op-Ed from an American Enterprise Institute scholar)

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A27211-2004Aug23.html

"I remember Christmas of 1968 sitting on a gunboat in Cambodia. I remember
what it was like to be shot at by Vietnamese and Khmer Rouge and Cambodians,
and have the president of the United States telling the American people that
I was not there; the troops were not in Cambodia. I have that memory which
is seared -- seared -- in me."
However seared he was, Kerry's spokesmen now say his memory was faulty. When the Swift boat veterans who oppose Kerry presented statements from his commanders and members of his unit denying that his boat entered Cambodia, none of Kerry's shipmates came forward, as they had on other issues, to corroborate his account. Two weeks ago Kerry's spokesmen began to backtrack.

The origins of the Swift Boat Veterans are in Kerry's practice, his entire political career, of playing up his medals and veteran credentials on one hand, and his anti-war activism on the other, with a repeated pattern of, er, "embellishing for dramatic effect." He threw his medals into the REflecting pool, or his ribbons, or someone else's ribbons on their behalf. The upshot was, that when his apolitical war buddies suddenly heard the other side of his mouth, they were PISSED. And so when political operatives came around signing them up for the Swift Boat project, they signed.

"The Clintons told the Bushes all about it."

I call horse$#!+. Possibly, they told the Bushes privately that "We didn't understand the al-Qaeda threat until too late in our eight years to do much about it. We found out, and pretty soon you'll find out too." Even if they said this, they knew that the Bushes would dismiss this as the blatherings of international ingenues that had stumbled through eight years of low-level chaos in Somalia, Rwanda, Bosnia, the West Bank and Gaza, North Korea, Afghanistan and Sudan with no more clue than when they hopped off the turnip truck from Arkansas. If the Clinton folks were serious about al-Qaeda as a threat in 2001, they had a perfect opportunity to do something or at least make a bunch of noise in December 2000 when jihadists blew up the USS Cole. If they really wanted to sound an alarm about terrorism, they could have, well, sounded an alarm in 2001 when they were out of office. Cilnton, Albright, Berger and Holbrooke were still getting booked on the Sunday newsmaker shows. They could have gone on ABC with their homeboy Stephanopolous.

But they didn't. So as to post hoc charges that the Clintons knew and the Bushes didn't listen, that's partisan crap.

MAn, these always end up longer than I expect.

The thing about a Presidential Daily Brief is that there's one every day.

What is dishonest about the August 8 PDB hullaballoo is that there is a wide variety of threats, all of which could be a critical threat to American national security.

China's military buildup could challenge US hegemony in East Asia within 10 years. Globalization could spread diseases from humanity's original heartland in Africa throughout the industrialized world. Reports indicate active attempts by the Russian underworld to acquire and sell nuclear weapons grade materials. Terrorist mastermind is seeking to strike inside the United States and hijack planes. Narcoterrorists are increasingly carving out a ministate in Colombia. Drug cartels have penetrated Mexican law enforcement to a crippling degree. A half-dozen rogue nations have or have had advanced nuclear weapons projects. Some scientists predict that rising sea levels will render coastal areas uninhabitable by 2025.

As Tommy Lee Jones said in Men In Black "There's always an Alien Battle Cruiser...or a Korlian Death Ray, or...an intergalactic plague about to wipe out life on this planet..." Which is why we had six Orange Alerts in 2004. Old School Emily Litella, It's always somethin'.

You could make a case that any of these threats should prompt a complete national mobilization before it's too late.

"They should have done what the Clinton Administration did when they got wind of the Millenium bombing plot."

Except that the Clinton Administration got confirmation of the Millenium bombing plot when one of the plotters was arrested two weeks before the millenium with a car trunk full of explosives. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4864792/ is the best link I can find right now.

"The election wasn't about moral values, @$$#0/3."

First of all, in these polls, etc. "moral values" is code for "religious voters." The fact is that the Democratic party base and heirarchy is secular. Aside from black people, the most predictably Democratic voting bloc is people who go to church "seldom or never", something like 70-30. And the most predictably Republican bloc is people who go to church at least once a week, something like 60-40. (Factor out the large black weekly churchgoing population, and the numbers for white regular churchgoers go closer to 70-30.) As churchgoing increases, Republican voting increases.

This isn't something that I especially like, but it's a political fact that Democrats have to figure out a way to grapple with. Remember, since 1964, the only Democrats to win the Presidency have been two southern, born-again Christians. Through the last twenty to thirty years, Democratic numbers among Catholics and working-class evangelicals have nose-dived.

Terror. Terror! TERROR!!

Franken is cleverly implying that American's fears are groundless or irrational, the products of cheap psychological tricks rather than a real concern. On the contrary, the jihad is real, and millions of Muslims would like to kill us in the process of establishing a worldwide Caliphate and restoring/inaugurating God's reign on earth. Their project of world conquest cannot succeed, but it can kill a hell of a lot of people on its way to failure.

That's why the Democrats can't win an election since 9/11 despite a mediocre President who in many ways has remained mediocre. Too much of the Democratic base doesn't believe that the jihadist threat is real. Democratic activists hearts really aren't in the War on Terror. It's not the sort of thing they got into politics for.

The analogy to the 2004 election would be a choice between a heart surgeon who was known to not be at or near the top of his field and a pure faith healer who says that you aren't sick, you only think you're sick.

"The number of studies that have proven no human link to Global Warming--None."

Franken either is or plays scientifically illiterate here. A study has an incredibly hard time proving an absolute negative--that there is NO correlation between X and Y. I haven't gone over the global warming debate for a few years, but, AFAIK, the state of play is that a large majority of scientists overall believe that man-made global warming is real. A much smaller majority, but still a majority, of climate scientists believe it. The rest believe that the computer models are only as good as the assumptions, and that there are natural cycles that overwhelm any human-generated effect.

"There have been zero Orange alerts since the election."

The fact that the color-coded alert system was scrapped may have something to do with this. (Pause to Google fruitlessly for cite.) Hey, nothing like research. Turns out the system wasn't scrapped, but DHS moved from raising and lowering the national alert level to alerts about specific sectors or regions. Right now, we've been on Yellow Alert at least since October 18, when it became safe to ride mass transit again.

My original point about the Orange Alerts--who was still paying attention to the color-coded system by 2004? The idea that the alerts were manipulated to affect voter behavior relies on the idea that the alerts were getting through to voters. By August 2004, the threat level was white noise, after a few dozen orange alerts with no apparent reason or resolution.

Cry Havoc, and Let Slip the L.A. Street Dogs of War!!

I ended up listening to the first half-hour or so three times, nitpicking new items each time, so other sections will not be as long as this one. The North Korea stuff at the bottom holds up pretty well, in my own opinion.

Key issue of ideology here, and the reason Democrats keep losing post 9/11 elections.

First of all, I grew up in New York in the 1970's and '80s, with subway rats the size of housecats. So I bought Franken's story of LA street dogs at first. Stray German sheperds, throw in some Rottweiler breeding, a pit bull-Great Dane mix a generation or two back, and the kind of neighborhood where an aspiring out-of-work actor/comedian with Al Franken's looks would have lived, and I'd buy packs of wild dogs in L.A. as very possible. He says that on his way home, late at night, he was blocked by a pack of snarling street dogs who could easily outrun him and outfight him. He was afraid, Bush voter afraid. Franken's dogs parallel the wolves of the final-stages Bush campaign ads.

I heard that bit, and perked up, wondering the outcome. My interest returned each time Franken's narrative returned to the dogs and that long ago 1974 night. How did Franken get past them? Or did he slowly retreat? Or was he rescued by armed law enforcement? By the biker gang who turned out to own the dogs? I was expecting some insight into how Franken believed that threats should be dealt with.

Eventually, Franken moved on to other subjects and dropped the street dogs. It became clear that he made the dogs up. There never were any dogs, they were just something scary that Franken imagined and made us (me) believe. The implication is that Bush made up the terrorism threat--that the threat was not only imaginary, but intentionally created by Bush to accomplish his goals, just like Franken made up the dogs.

What is revealed is that Franken doesn't take the terrorism threat seriously. He believes that it's made up by Republicans to keep themselves in power. As long as major sections of the Democratic party believe that the threats to our national security and our civilization are imaginary, then they will not and should not be trusted with power.

"The Only Thing We Have To Feah Is Feah Itself"

This isn't a factual quibble, but a historical one. Franken's parallel between 9/11 and the Depression is rather ridiculous if extended beyond "They were both Bad." FDR's famous statement was not a declaration that we should never fear anything--he was talking about a specific economic situation. During the Depression, people were afraid to put their money in banks or stocks or open a business or whatever. Being afraid, they essentially kept their money in their mattresses. This deprived the economy of liquid capital, so banks couldn't lend money, businesses couldn't buy machinery, workers couldn't get jobs at working the machines that hadn't been bought, etc. There was, in fact, a lot of productive capacity sitting idle because of the reality that, if you built widgets, no one could afford to buy them anyway.

The only way out of that problem was for people to stop worrying that the banks and stock market were unsafe--the major problem holding back that part of the economy was fear of the economy getting worse. The legitimate parallel here is to Bush's widely (and semi-justly) mocked advocacy of shopping to show the terrorists that we weren't intimidated.

Franken's theme here, that Bush should have reacted to 9/11 by ignoring the threat of terrorism and organizing a national (global?) group hug or something is as asinine as if FDR reacted to the continuing Depression by organizing a large army and overthrowing Juan Peron.

WSJ Once Claimed that Clinton Ran Over Teenagers With a Train?

Franken claims that the Wall Street Journal editorial page claimed that Clinton was involved in running over teenagers with a train. The Journal editorial page accused Clinton of a lot of things, from covering up details of Vince Foster's death (probably true, but not as bad as that makes it sound) to conniving at the CIA running drugs out of Mena Airport (rather unlikely, but not impossible--would a politically ambitious governor of a Southern state blow the whistle on a CIA operation in his backyard?) so I'm not certain of this one, but I was a full member of the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy, so I'd say that there's a 90% probability I'd have heard that one.

Al Franken's Truth With Jokes (on CD)--A Running Review Commentary

First of all, some stylistic points. Franken has a voice made for print media. His style highlights one of the reasons that Limbaugh has been so successful while "leftwing Limbaughs" have come and gone. Limbaugh started out as a radio pro, with a quality bombastic base voice. The Simpsons voice Limbaugh most resembles is fellow blowhard Kent Brockman. The Simpsons voice Franken most resembles is Dr. Frink.

But I have been asked to focus on matters of substance, factual quibbles and sometimes serious issues of ideology.

One petty thing—only those deep in the Democratic bubble went to bed on election night 2004 thinking that the election was still in doubt. Kerry was 130,000 votes short, with 250,000 provisional votes still unopened. If every provisional vote was validated and counted, Kerry still needed to take 75% of those votes to edge out Bush. Taking 75% of the vote is pretty darned rare in a contested election, and the necessary percentage goes up with every provisional ballot that turns out not to be valid.

On Bush's Mandate. A mandate is, broadly speaking, a license from the people to do whatever it is that you promised to do. The concept's ancestry goes back, I suppose, to Andrew Jackson's presidency, and his or his supporters' theory that the national popular election of the President makes him the unique embodiment of the people's will. Which all sounds a little bit creepy and fascistic to twenty-first century ears, but there you are.

There is a very good argument to be made that most reelection landslides do not carry a mandate, for the reason that the incumbent didn't take any bold or risky stands in the election. This would be the case for Clinton '96, Reagan '84, Nixon '72, Eisenhower '56. These elections remind us of patriarch Joe Kennedy's legendary "Don't buy a single vote more than we need, Jack—I'll be damned if I'll pay extra for a landslide." They didn't have much mandate because, in their reelection campaigns, they didn't promise to do much.

Reelection landslides with mandates would include LBJ '64 and FDR '36. They had promised to do stuff, and the country approved overwhelmingly.

W '04 won a mandate to stay the course in Iraq and to stand firm against terrorism, and maybe to blow up more countries that might have terrorists in them. That was his campaign theme, that was what he put all his chips on and won. He didn't win by much, but he won, and he won a majority, which hadn't actually been done in a while. The unnamed source of his mandate, however, was the Republican success under the W banner in the 2002 and 2004 congressional elections. For GOP candidates, W stood for Winning. That's evaporated, along with Bush's mixed bag of a domestic agenda.

I don't quite know why the mainstream media agreed with the Bush mandate pravda. My (and Franken's) best guess is that they used the word "mandate" to stand in for "he's not handicapped by Florida 2000 anymore, to the extent that he ever let that handicap him."

That was long, but this is blogging, so editing be damned.