If Osama Bin Laden knew about an Al Qaeda attack in the works between now and Tuesday, he wouldn’t have released the tape he did. He would have remained silent, or he would have tried to spread fear by hinting at what was to come. Instead, we get this: a rambling message, at times incoherent, all in all, rather pathetic. More than anything else, it seems to me like a desperate political move — trying to make his voice heard, though he nothing to say.

In other words, the only importance of the tape, as far as I’m concerned, is that it means there’s not going to be an election-related terrorist attack. So get out there and vote.

Looking into my crystal ball, I see . . .

1. A Kerry win.

2. A full-court conservative attack on Kerry that, “as Matthew Yglesias notes”:http://yglesias.typepad.com/matthew/2004/10/the_sea_was_ang.html, will backfire in the long run. The thing to watch out for especially is when bad news comes out of Iraq and they actually have the gall to blame Kerry for it — I’m clenching my teeth already just thinking about it. They will not let up. It will make what they did to Clinton look like a cakewalk.

3. Partly because of this, partly because of a hostile Congress, and partly due to his own limitations, Kerry will not win a second term. He will run against John McCain and lose.

Now, I’ll take Kerry followed by McCain over Bush followed by _whomever_ any day of the week. And my crystal ball has been configured with the assumption that Kerry will be a competent President, but not a great one. Just in case he has some of that “great” potential, though, here’s some advice for him:

Senator Kerry, take advantage of the turmoil in the Republican party that will bubble up after their election loss. There are plenty of conservatives who are beyond fed up with Bush and will have little appetite for attack-dog politics over the next four years. Reach out to them. Be a genuine uniter-not-a-divider when it comes to your Cabinet. Ask Colin Powell to continue to be Secretary of State. You’ll piss off some wingers on your side of the fence, but you will also isolate the wingers on the other side, and it will be easier for people to see their attacks against you for what they are: the frothing at the mouth of the lunatic fringe. If you can pull this off, even if you don’t win a second term, your friend John McCain will have the opportunity to lead a Republican party that’s not an embarrassment to the nation.

One aspect of the missing explosives¹ story ought to be a shock at the fact that the Department of Defense was aware of them but all this time has kept a lid on the news, unwilling to share it with the IAEA or even the American people. Only a fledgling Iraqi government, starting to flex its muscles, was willing to let the IAEA know. But it’s not a shock, because if you’ve been paying attention, this is only the latest in a long string of examples of this Administration putting political expediency and self-preservation above sound policy, above the war on terror, above honesty, even above their own ideology.

Or maybe not. But the alternative to that viewpoint is something along the lines of “everybody is out to get George Bush,” with the understanding that “everybody” includes, most significantly, the Liberal Media, which is, in coordinated fashion, working as a de facto extension of the Kerry campaign. We’re left with that choice: EITHER the situation in Iraq has turned out badly due to not only a lack of planning but a complete lack of interest in planning on the part of Bush’s inner circle, OR the Liberal Media has it in for Bush and is harping on all the lousy news to make him look bad.

From The American Conservative, via Kevin Drum, we have a scene from a Cheney briefing:

The [CIA Counter Terrorism Center] concluded that Saddam Hussein had not materially supported Zarqawi before the U.S.-led invasion and that Zarqawi’s infrastructure in Iraq before the war was confined to the northern no-fly zones of Kurdistan, beyond Baghdad’s reach. Cheney reacted with fury, screaming at the briefer that CIA was trying to get John Kerry elected by contradicting the president’s stance that Saddam had supported terrorism and therefore needed to be overthrown. The hapless briefer was shaken by the vice president’s outburst, and the incident was reported back to [newly appointed CIA director Porter] Goss, who indicated that he was reluctant to confront the vice president’s staff regarding it.

In this case, EITHER the whole story is a fabrication from that cornerstone of the Liberal Media, The American Conservative, OR the CIA is making stuff up to try to get Kerry elected, OR Dick Cheney is (and has been) completely off his rocker.

What boggles my mind is the sheer scope of the conspiracy that must exist, in the media and beyond, to exonerate this Administration. Those wily left-wingers have not only misreported on Iraq, but they’ve managed to turn nonissues like Abu Ghraib and the outing of Valerie Plame into “scandals,” and they’ve coopted figures as diverse as Richard Clarke and Paul O’Neill. Plus the whole CIA. In order for Bush to be right, all those people, from the policymakers and Cabinet officials to the reporters and reporters’ bosses, must either be mistaken or deliberately wrong.

Belief in a conspiracy like that is out there, and may not even be all that uncommon. It is buttressed by good old-fashioned ignorance—The Program on International Policy Attitudes reports that “75% of Bush supporters continue to believe that Iraq was providing substantial support to al Qaeda.” (That’s only one of a laundry list of literally astounding statistics in their report.) I don’t think it’s too far out of line to suggest that these two things—habitual distrust on the media based on an assumption of systemic bias, and ignorance of basic facts about recent history—are related.

George Bush will be judged harshly—certainly by history, or sooner if he’s elected to a second term and must lie in the bed he’s made. At that point many of his supporters will admit, if only to themselves, that they were wrong. That is never an easy thing to do. People are extremely good at perceiving the world in ways that justify their decisions and confirm their assumptions, and adjusting that perception is often a painful process. Hopefully—for the good of the country and the world—enough of his former supporters can make that adjustment before November 2.

¹ (Josh Marshall has been all over it—start here and keep reading up for a synthesis of the whole situation and the subsequent reporting thereof).

Computer gamers (especially Doom fans) must not under any circumstances miss The Staging Point’s “audit from hell”:http://stagingpoint.com/archives/000393.html. Very funny. Hat tip to “Ed”:http://www.edheil.com/mmh/.

Some time after the third game, I heard an interview on the radio with a guy from Boston. His team was down 0-3, but he was still upbeat — “It’s all right,” he said. “All we’ve got to do is come back and win the next four.” He didn’t seem the least bit worried. _They’re doomed and he doesn’t know it_, I thought to myself. _There’s got to be a word for that_.

I was wrong. And there _is_ a word: it’s “hope.”

I’m not a sports guy. The end of Game 7 is the only baseball I’ve watched in years. But the Red Sox and a dude on the radio taught me a lesson about hope tonight. Thanks, guys. I’m rooting for you.

Neal Stephenson subjected himself to the ol’ “Slashdot interview”:http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/10/20/1518217 treatment, and the results are a splendid treat for all of us. Way better questions than the ones he was asked at signings while he was in town recently, and of course he has much longer, better answers too, since he has time to think and write them down. His disquisition on Beowulf writers and Dante writers is the second best thing in the interview, trailing only slightly behind the truth (at last!) about his battles with William Gibson:

The first time was a year or two after SNOW CRASH came out. I was doing a reading/signing at White Dwarf Books in Vancouver. Gibson stopped by to say hello and extended his hand as if to shake. But I remembered something Bruce Sterling had told me. For, at the time, Sterling and I had formed a pact to fight Gibson. Gibson had been regrown in a vat from scraps of DNA after Sterling had crashed an LNG tanker into Gibson’s Stealth pleasure barge in the Straits of Juan de Fuca. During the regeneration process, telescoping Carbonite stilettos had been incorporated into Gibson’s arms. Remembering this in the nick of time, I grabbed the signing table and flipped it up between us. Of course the Carbonite stilettos pierced it as if it were cork board, but this spoiled his aim long enough for me to whip my wakizashi out from between my shoulder blades and swing at his head. He deflected the blow with a force blast that sprained my wrist. The falling table knocked over a space heater and set fire to the store. Everyone else fled. Gibson and I dueled among blazing stacks of books for a while. Slowly I gained the upper hand, for, on defense, his Praying Mantis style was no match for my Flying Cloud technique. But I lost him behind a cloud of smoke. Then I had to get out of the place. The streets were crowded with his black-suited minions and I had to turn into a swarm of locusts and fly back to Seattle.

There’s much more in there, too. Go read.

Let’s pause and consider how rich it is that Bush is accusing Kerry of using the “politics of fear,” when he’s the one running with Dick “Our cities are doomed. _Doomed_, I tell you!” Cheney.

On “NPR this morning”:http://www.npr.org/rundowns/rundown.php?prgDate=20-Oct-2004&prgId=3 they ran a little spot on the subject, looking at Kerry’s flu chatter and Cheney’s apocalypse chatter. Fair enough — it _is_ silly that Kerry’s trying to make political hay out of the flu shortage, and he deserves to be called on it. But “You won’t get your flu shot and _it’s his fault_!” just doesn’t have the same horrific ring as “You’ll die in a nuclear explosion and _it’s his fault!_” And Kerry’s pulling this nonsense just now, opportunistically, whereas Cheney’s been doing it all through the campaign.

The spot is one of those classic instances of “balance” where equal time and consideration are given to unequal offenses. I realize this sort of thing is normal in the media, but despite “previous frustrations”:http://www.polytropos.org/archives/000480.html, I still expect more from NPR, and am frequently disappointed.

I haven’t brought up the “Ron Suskind article”:http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/17/magazine/17BUSH.html?oref=login&oref=login&pagewanted=all&position= because I didn’t have all that much new to say about it, but if you haven’t read it yet, do. It’s one of those pieces which will have some people shouting “liberal bias!” at the top of their lungs, and for once they’re probably right. But Suskind (as “Gary”:http://amygdalagf.blogspot.com/ notes) has a knack for getting people to talk to him who shouldn’t, and bias or no bias, their words speak for themselves. For those of you who don’t read other blogs, here’s the money quote:

In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn’t like about Bush’s former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House’s displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn’t fully comprehend — but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.

The aide said that guys like me were “in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

It’s an audacious quote, but I think Kevin Drum is right “when he says”:http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2004_10/004937.php that the sentiment behind it is simply “Bush is a doer, not an analyzer,” and that making much more of it than that might be making too much. Matthew Yglesias is also right “when he says”:http://yglesias.typepad.com/matthew/2004/10/about_suskind.html that the core of the article — linking Bush’s mode of behavior to his faith — is quite weak. (As an aside, the “we make reality” attitude dovetails with conservatives’ great ability to shape the terms of debate — and thus dominate discourse — using language, in everything from “flip-flop” to “the war on terror” and “tax relief.” See “George Lakoff”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Lakoff.)

But, all that said, it remains clear that the Bush Administration has operated with astounding arrogance, very often ignoring or trying to shout down what all us poor thinking types like to refer to as “reality.” If Suskind’s article only advances that observation a little, it does, in the above quote, provide us with a convenient rallying cry. Thanks to “Gene Healy”:http://www.affbrainwash.com/genehealy/archives/014963.php for pointing it out:

PROUD MEMBER, REALITY-BASED COMMUNITY

I’ll be getting me one of those t-shirts when they’re available, and changing the blog’s subtitle through election day or so.

Should we also work on a secret handshake or something?

UPDATE: Don’t miss Teresa Nielsen Hayden’s “take on Suskind’s piece and much more”:http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/005631.html#005631.

UPDATE: Healy’s entry now has links to a couple different Cafepress t-shirt options. The first batch are missing the hyphen in “reality-based,” which is a small thing, but rubs me the wrong way. The logo on the second batch is simply too much. It will already be tricky to explain the t-shirt to people who aren’t familiar with the meme in question. How much more so with the Latin and the Escher? I think I’ll hold out for option #3, if and when it comes.

Gary Farber of “Amygdala”:http://www.amygdalagf.blogspot.com/ has posted, by my count, an average of 14 posts a day over the past four days. He’s linktastic! He’s out of control! Somebody stop him — if you dare!

Via “Matthew Yglesias”:http://yglesias.typepad.com/matthew/ via “Kos”:http://www.dailykos.com/, we have a “video”:http://www.dailykos.com/images/admin/President_Bush_Thanks_ISG.mpg of President Bush privately addressing the Iraq Survey Group (presumably some time in 2002-3). Kos hightlights Bush’s faltering delivery, but that’s not what concerns me. What concerns me (but does not surprise me) is the attitude exemplified in this statement:

. . . You’re truth-finders — you’re the folks we’re countin’ on to explain to not only our fellow citizens but to the entire world the true nature of evil . . .

It’s not “You’re truth-finders — you’re the folks we’re countin’ on to discover the truth about Saddam’s weapons programs.” For Bush, it’s “the true nature of evil.” Like I said, this isn’t _surprising_, but it does reinforce the sense that Bush pre-judged the situation in stark black-and-white terms that left no room for, as it turned out, the truth. And besides, how does someone concerned about ultimate evil pick Saddam over Osama bin Laden? Or Zarqawi, for that matter, whose assets were frozen — guess when? — “just yesterday”:http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=578&e=3&u=/nm/20041015/ts_nm/security_treasury_zarqawi_dc (hat tip to “TPM”:http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/week_2004_10_10.php#003691).