On The List, a venerable mailing list of college friends, a discussion came up a little while ago in which a certain gulf became evident: that between People Who Read Blogs and People Who Don’t. There was some understandable resentment at the fact that many of the folks who used to contribute witty observations, charming vignettes, and other miscellany to The List were now chiefly writing that sort of thing on their blogs, and while some folks had easily made the transition to keeping up with their friends’ websites, others hadn’t.

One thing that became clear is that for many people there’s a big difference, conceptually, between going-out-to-visit-that-site and having-that-email-come-to-me. In real, physical terms the amount of effort to read one versus the other is nearly the same, and of course both involve sitting and staring at a computer screen and are indistinguishable to someone who’s watching you. But nevertheless that difference in the basic metaphor for what’s going on is significant.

I had always been one of those who acclimated to reading blogs quickly, and have kept up with a fair number of them through the help of one news aggregator or another. But I’ve been hit with a solid reminder that the going-there vs. bringing-here metaphor counts — I just installed “Thunderbird 0.8”:http://www.mozilla.org/products/thunderbird/, an email program that comes with a built-in “News & Blogs” feedreader. It’s similar in function to the aggregator plugin I’d been using for the Firefox browser, but I find it much, much cooler to use — partly because it’s faster, but mainly, I think, because now all the new blog entries (or links to new blog entries) are coming up right in my email program, and it _feels like they’re coming to me_. Suddenly reading other blogs _seems_ much easier to do.

Which may be a bad thing, since I’ve already added a handful of blogs to my already-crammed reading roster. But anyway, Thunderbird: highly recommended.

The Polytropos/Cerin Amroth collective will be upgrading to Movable Type 3.1 — maybe in an hour, maybe later tonight. Hopefully everything will emerge on the other side unscathed. But if things look screwy for a while, or don’t appear, or if links are broken or something, now you know why.

UPDATE: Well. The only problem was that I had to reupload most stuff because I hadn’t done it in ASCII mode. I was thinking I’d have to tweak style sheets and whatnot, but everything seems groovy. It was easy. Almost _too_ easy . . .

Never let it be said that I don’t take requests! The following is excerpted from an email I received from a highly respected reader who, in case he wishes to remain anonymous, I will simply refer to as GP:

Reading your political observations I am often reminded of my many years of high school and college debating experiences. It was always highly advantageous to present the negative side of a debate topic. Presenting the affirmative case required of us much more preparation and ingenuity. The reason is obvious: it is much easier to attack than to defend, to offer objections rather than pose positive plans or directions.

I think of this when I read your continuing attacks in Bush and those around him. Though I think some of your observations reflect a strong party line, I must add my great disappointment with many of the actions and decisions he has made. I have often observed that I think this may be the first election I sit out. . . but that leads me to . . .

wait for you to present a positive note (the affirmative side) on the Kerry-Edwards promises for the future. What contributions has he made in his 20 years in the Senate? Where is he at this moment on the future of our dealings with Iraq, medicare, social security? Just who is this man and what does he offer in a responsible fashion (please don’t promise me lower taxes and at the same time great new social expenditures)? I think the Democrats missed a great opportunity to offer a much stronger candidate than a person I can’t follow from one week to the next.

So, hearing your presentation of the negative case that has much with which I agree, I wait for the next issue of your political reflections on the affirmative side of the case.

First of all, I haven’t commented all that much about Kerry until now because I’m not super excited about him. I think he’s running a bad campaign, in two senses: One, his campaign has as many empty promises, heavily-finessed numbers, and misleading generalizations as every other political campaign, ever—this doesn’t set his apart, but it’s still cause for disappointment. Two, his campaign has lacked a strong voice; he hasn’t really communicated himself to the American people. He’s finally speaking the truth about Iraq, but waiting until now to do it makes him seem opportunistic—and it would carry a lot more weight if he had taken a strong stand against the war from the beginning.

My support for Kerry is, admittedly, partisan—that is to say, I believe that it’s better to have a Democrat than a Republican in the White House, all else being equal. Though I did bristle a little when I read: “some of your observations [i.e. attacks on Bush & Co.] reflect a strong party line . . .” Though I wouldn’t be voting for Bush anyway for partisan reasons, my vociferous opposition to him is rooted in the cataclysmic mishandling of the situation in Iraq, and the consequent weakening of the war on Al Qaeda. These failures have little if anything to do with traditional policy differences between the parties.

But this is supposed to be about Kerry. Let me address GP’s questions in turn:

• “What contributions has he made in his 20 years in the Senate?”

  It seems like serving for a couple decades in the Senate and always being reelected by your constituency should count for a little something all by itself! And his investigative record—most notably his work uncovering the Reagan Administration’s seedy dealings with Nicaraguan Contras—should be plenty for anyone to hang their hat on. He lacks any high-profile legislation with his name on it, but that seems to me to be a function of life as a perpetual junior senator, coupled with contentment at working behind the scenes and supporting the legislation of others. The real problem here is that his campaign has decided to play up his Vietnam record and ignore his Senate service, which has left the Bush campaign free to characterize that service as they see fit.

  One of the Bush campaign’s biggest successes is getting the “flip-flopper” meme out there and making it stick—something that would at least have been harder to do if Kerry had just stood by his Senate record. For every time Kerry’s position has shifted with the political winds, there’s half a dozen times where he was taking a nuanced position on a complex issue. That sort of thing should be de rigeur for American policymakers, and is—the fact that it’s painted as a vice is one of the more ridiculous aspects of an already ridiculous campaign season.

• “Where is he at this moment on the future of our dealings with Iraq . . .”

  Nowhere, which is exactly where we all are. There’s nowhere else to be. What I mean is: there are no good outcomes for Iraq, and no paths that will lead to good outcomes. The time to have handled the occupation properly is long past, and the time for not occupying in the first place is even longer past. Now we must all live with the consequences. Kerry’s position, such as it is, is to internationalize efforts to maintain peace there. I don’t think bringing NATO in will necessarily reduce the odds of civil war, but it will certainly take some pressure off the U.S. Though it’s not anything close to a fix, broader international involvement will help, on balance. When it comes to Kerry vs. Bush, only Kerry is going to be able to appeal for multilateral cooperation with any degree of credibility.

• ”. . . medicare, social security?”

  Looking over the details of Kerry’s plans on his campaign website, I see some positive points—for example, an awareness that the Medicare drug bill passed last year was a fiasco, and an open stance on drug reimportation. On the other hand, his three “pillars” for strengthening Social Security are “Grow the Economy,” “Restore Fiscal Discipline,” and “Bipartisan Process”—all valid as far as they go, but they aren’t exactly robust, concrete policy suggestions. But I think it’s important to note that the positions and proposals he’s had on these issues have been there and been the same for quite a while. The phrasing of the question (“Where is he at this moment . . .”) implies that he’s been changing his mind a lot lately. Certainly he’s had a hard time communicating his views, but that’s a campaign problem, not a policy one.

  All in all, I agree with GP—I wish the Democrats had fielded a stronger candidate. Howard Dean could have spoken out much more forcefully and clearly on Iraq, and wouldn’t have run just another bland, focus-grouped-to-death campaign. But Kerry is good enough to be a strong alternative to Bush. In a time when national security involves a struggle against a decentralized, stateless foe, there are no easy answers, no black and white choices. Kerry is a canny career politician who’s accustomed to navigating complex policy issues and working with colleagues across the aisle. He’s no good at articulating nuanced positions, but he’s good at having them. That’s the kind of guy we want in the White House at this time. At any time.

  UPDATE: On that last point, have a look at Kerry’s speech on the Senate floor, October 9, 2002 (hat tip to Matthew Yglesias. ). It’s the one he made to explain his vote in favor of authorizing force in Iraq. It’s long and at times complicated, but it makes clear his willingness to use force coupled with his strong caution at going to war alone or without sufficient cause. It makes clear that he hasn’t flipped or flopped on the issue one bit, and, I must say, ups my respect for him by a few notches.

If you’re like me, then you’ve often wondered (all the more so in these trying times), “What if Swedish playwright August Strindberg had had a chipper floating pink ball as a sidekick?” Now, at last, “we know the answer”:http://www.strindbergandhelium.com/.

Hat tip to the Johns (Flansburgh and Linnell, not Kerry and Edwards) on the TMBG-Announce mailing list.

I find that I have nothing to add to “what I said last year”:http://www.polytropos.org/archives/000081.html on this occasion. And I see that “Jim”:http://www.highclearing.com/archivesuo/week_2004_09_05.html#005507 has come to the same conclusion; “his words from last year”:http://www.highclearing.com/archivesuo/week_2003_09_07.html#004411 were relevant then and are even more relevant now.

Sentences have been handed down in the trials of Simon Mann and his mercenary band at Chikurubi prison in Zimbabwe.  The more we learn about their ill-fated plan to overthrow the government of Equatorial Guinea, the more it seems like “bumbling mercenary band” would be the best way to describe them. It’s not clear whether they were actually set up at the Harare airport, but it is clear that their mission was a widely known secret in the mercenary community back in South Africa.

Their sentences — one year for most of them, sixteen months for the pilots, seven years for Mann himself — would seem rather light, except that they weren’t being charged for their intended actions, but on miscellaenous immigration and weapons violation charges. They all pled guilty, perhaps in expectation of a hefty fine and boot on the rear on their way out the door, so in that context the sentences — especially Mann’s — are rather severe. According to the BBC one British MP, Henry Bellingham, has called for his government to help get Mann out of jail.

As with everything else in this crazy affair, I’m not sure what to think about the sentences. Privately funded coups-d’etats are not a trend I’m crazy about seeing increase, but this particular operation was so inept that it’s hard to see these guys as being actually dangerous. So we’re back to the principle of the thing, but when you set that against other principles like “getting a fair trial,” it’s still hard to know what should have happened. All in all — with apologies to the mercenaries’ wives — it seems like a pretty good outcome. They didn’t get shipped off to EG for a show trial, and they obviously didn’t run afoul of what the Zimbabwean government would have liked to do to them if South Africa hadn’t been watching over their shoulder. But they didn’t walk away with a hand slap either. Mann’s the one who they really stuck it to, but, as the Guardian notes, his connections mean that there’s likely to be some backroom dealing on his behalf once the whole affair has settled beneath the news radar again.

The fun task of sorting out who funded the coup attempt remains, and Mark Thatcher — currently out on bail in South Africa — will be a central figure in that drama. The rumor mill gives us something called the “wonga list,” apparently a list of coup funders held by (and it doesn’t get any more specific than this) “one of those involved.”  The most prominent name on it besides Thatcher is Ely Calil, a Britain-based Lebanese businessman whose name as been associated with the coup from the beginning. He’s currently being sued by Equatorial Guinea, and possibly planning a countersuit. The juicy details, unfortunately, are for the moment limited to those in the know and those with a subscription to Africa Confidential, and I am neither. Alas.

Let’s play Fanciful Connect the Dots! The Guardian reports that Mann’s contribution to the operation was raised “against shares he owned in diamond concessions.” And he founded Executive Outcomes, which was active in Sierra Leone, home of the blood diamond trade. So what if Mann had blood diamond connections, which put him in touch with Al Qaeda on his end, and then elsewhere on the wonga list there turns out to be (as Kathryn Cramer) some Texas oilman who happens to be a big financial backer of Bush. It’d be a bit of a stretch, but we’d have a Bush Administration-Al Qaeda connection!

Aw, but we’ve been there, done that. If it’s connect-the-dots level BA-AQ connections we want, we already have Victor Bout — and that doesn’t even involve any idle speculation!

From “AP”:http://apnews.myway.com/article/20040907/D84V15AG0.html, via “Josh Marshall”:http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/, I give you VP Cheney:

“It’s absolutely essential that eight weeks from today, on Nov. 2, we make the right choice, because if we make the wrong choice then the danger is that we’ll get hit again and we’ll be hit in a way that will be devastating from the standpoint of the United States,” Cheney told about 350 supporters at a town-hall meeting in this Iowa city.

This is fearmongering, pure and simple, folks. The notion that terrorists would prefer to attack under one President more than another is ridiculous on its face. The danger exists no matter who wins the election. What we have here is a seed of fear being planted. Cheney doesn’t care that the claim is indefensible nonsense — all that matters is that it gets people nervous and fearful.

I see that the Kerry campaign has a “response”:http://blog.johnkerry.com/blog/archives/002745.html#002745, though unfortunately it’s written in bland campaign-ese, and lacks force. Hopefully they’ll stay on this one and not let it slip through the cracks.

UPDATE: Via a number of people (“Jim”:http://www.highclearing.com first in person, then “Matthew”:http://yglesias.typepad.com/matthew/2004/09/the_law_enforce.html) — the above quote turns out to be only the first part of the sentence. Shame on AP. Here’s the whole thing from the transcript:

Because if we make the wrong choice, then the danger is that we’ll get hit again, that we’ll be hit in a way that will be devastating from the standpoint of the United States, and that we’ll fall back into the pre-9/11 mind set if you will, that in fact these terrorist attacks are just criminal acts, and that we’re not really at war. I think that would be a terrible mistake for us.

Cheney could have avoided a whole lot of trouble by saying “Because if we make the wrong choice, then the danger is that _if_ we get hit again . . .”

So it’s not fearmongering, really, when you look at the whole quote. It’s still nonsense, though, and touches on some of my complaints about the war on terror metaphor. One of the binary choices Republicans are trying to cement in people’s minds is “Being At War vs. Mere Law Enforcement Activity.” To anyone who takes a moment’s thought it should be obvious that Al Qaeda is a threat that doesn’t fit neatly into either of those categories, and that taking them down requires an entirely new approach. The terrorist attacks _aren’t_ just criminal acts, but we _aren’t_ at war either, not in any conventional sense; Cheney’s speech cleverly juxtaposes those two issues so as to reinforce the spurious either/or choice. And the notion that anyone in this country would just blithely fall back into a pre-9/11 mindset is, frankly, insulting.

So, replace “fearmongering” with “a false binary that tries to create the impression that Kerry can’t fight the war on terror.” Which is merely a sort of indirect fearmongering. Anyway, see Matthew Yglesias’ comments (linked above) on the subject as well.

UPDATE: Stop the presses — as “Ed”:http://goesping.org/ notes in the comments, and “as reported”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A6629-2004Sep8.html in the Post, the transcript to the speech was changed to a less egregious phrasing, ostensibly to fix a typo. Raise your hand if you believe that.

ONE MORE UPDATE: I just heard that snippet of the speech again on the radio. In Cheney’s phrasing of “we’ll get hit again,” there is no implied “if” clause. Text+intonation clearly imply everything that everyone first supposed he was implying.

Thanks to all who responded to “my request”:http://www.polytropos.org/archives/000395.html for help in navigating the pernicious world of mattress retail. We ordered one this morning, so while the word’s still out on the mattress itself, the shopping experience went very well. A number of people recommended going to a department store of some sort instead of a mattress-only vendor, the thinking in part being that such a place has an incentive to get you back as a repeat customer. Whether or not that’s true as a trend, it is certainly the case that the JC Penney in Springfield Mall is a good place to buy a mattress, and that Donna the salesperson is a good person to buy one from. She was laid back, informative, and far from trying to force the most expensive mattress on us, actually ended up recommending one a few steps down.

I violated my longstanding rule to never, ever enter the vicinity of a mall on a weekend, much less on a holiday. But we took advantage of the fact that (unlike in pre-Ella days) we were actually up at 9:00 on a holiday, and zipped in shortly after the place opened. We managed to escape just as the crowds were getting intolerable.

If the actual mattress turns out well, then this whole process will have been surprisingly painless. Time will tell, and all will be explained in Part II.

The Batman “shows his true face”:http://www.suntimes.com/output/news/cst-nws-party30.html (hat tip to “Neil Gaiman”:http://www.neilgaiman.com/journal/journal.asp):

A 6-foot-tall, 275-pound bearded man crashed a children’s birthday party in Oak Forest, identified himself as “vengeance,” then helped himself to a piece of cake, police said.

The incident occurred earlier this month at a home in the 14800 block of South Landings Lane in the south suburb, Deputy Police Chief Nick Sparacino said.

When the owner of the home asked the man who he was, the intruder replied, “I am vengeance. I am the knight. I am Batman.” Then the man went into the kitchen, cut a piece of birthday cake, took it into the living room and ate it.

After continued questioning by the homeowner, the man left the house and drove off in a red 1988 Cadillac.

Police haven’t found the man yet and want to charge him with criminal trespass.

“I’ve been on the job 31 years and I’ve seen a lot of weird stuff, but nothing like this,” Sparacino said.

Zell Miller’s RNC speech from last night is dangerous stuff. I didn’t see it live, so I don’t know what kind of response he was getting from the delegates, but anything more than uncomfortable silence and seat-squirming is disturbing to contemplate, even among those highly partisan folks. Here’s one part that’s really scary:

Motivated more by partisan politics than by national security, today’s Democratic leaders see America as an occupier, not a liberator.

And nothing makes this Marine madder than someone calling American troops occupiers rather than liberators.

Tell that to the one-half of Europe that was freed because Franklin Roosevelt led an army of liberators, not occupiers.

Tell that to the lower half of the Korean Peninsula that is free because Dwight Eisenhower commanded an army of liberators, not occupiers.

Tell that to the half a billion men, women and children who are free today from the Baltics to the Crimea, from Poland to Siberia, because Ronald Reagan rebuilt a military of liberators, not occupiers.

In the first sentence, we have a false generalization (“today’s Democratic leaders see…”) buttressed by a false dichotomy (“occupier, not a liberator”). But it’s that second sentence that’s the real marvel. “Nothing makes this Marine madder” reminds us that he served as soldier, who is angry when “someone calls American troops occupiers…” The implication is that the Democratic leaders have said this, which of course they haven’t; he’s only asserted that that’s how they (collectively) saw things in the previous sentence. Also buried in that second sentence is the assumption that it is the troops who make themselves occupiers and/or liberators, and thus to impugn their mission is to to impugn them (and their honor and courage). But of course it’s the policymakers and other leaders who decide on the mission who determine the role the soldiers will play, not the soldiers themselves—and in any case that role will almost never fall neatly into a discrete category of “liberator” or “occupier” or anything else. The following sentences at least contain the germ of an arguable point: “This war is like World War II, the Korean War, and the Cold War.” But Miller still tries to drape that point (which is asserted, but not argued) in the mantle of the soldiers who fought in those wars, as if it is their very presence that redeemed those causes.

Everything is further muddled by the fact that the word “war” has been stripped of nearly all inherent meaning. The Cold War was not a war in the same sense as WWII or the Korean War—and the latter was clearly a subset of the Cold War in the first place. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are over, in the narrow sense of the word, and Miller leaves it unclear as to whether he is referring to those specific engagements or to the larger “war on terror.” But ultimately he’s not interested in such distinctions—he is merely invoking “war” as grounds for unswerving fealty to the current President, and trotting out the old nonsense that anyone who stands against it is “against freedom.” Earlier in the speech, Miller asserts that “our nation is being torn apart and made weaker” because of the Democrats and their desire to bring Bush down. Our nation is being torn apart, and it has been made weaker, by its current leaders, and that’s why Bush has to go.

Much of the rest of Miller’s speech consists of demonstrably false statements, which are less interesting than clever and misleading rhetoric. But it’s the rhetorically clever parts that are the most troubling, because framing the words in the right way can frame the terms of the argument if you let them. Consider the “war on terror.” Powerful words. They’re a consciously crafted metaphor that has succeeded in shaping all our discourse, from Republicans to Democrats to the media to people on the street. How I wish those words had never stuck. If instead of the War on Terror we had the War on Al Qaeda—or if our leaders had the honesty to say that, as something that’s not winnable in any conventional sense, this isn’t something that should even be called a war, but something else—then it wouldn’t have been so easy to sell an unrelated fight in Iraq to the American people, and all this nonsense about “we can’t change leaders while we’re at war” wouldn’t be circulating around, and both political parties might be less hung up on militaristic chest-pounding. There’s never been a better example of the power of a simple metaphor to shape reality than the “war on terror.”

UPDATE: Josh Marshall has the text of Jimmy Carter’s reply to Zell Miller.