Nassau County Executive Thomas Suozzi's "Fix Albany" campaign racked up an impressive win Tuesday by pulling off the tough task of unseating an incumbent state legislator - and one from his own political party in a primary, no less.

Why do I see a metaphor for the Democratic party nationally in the Democratic party where I live? I backed Suozzi for County Executive. Sidikman was a man who fought the system. Yes he eventually decided his constituents would suffer if he kept bucking Silver without any support, but he knew change was needed. Instead of building a team to change the legislature from seasoned legislators, Suozzi put in a new guy. I don't know everything that goes on behind closed doors, but if this is really a step towards reforming the legislature I don't see how.

Noizyblog got this via boingboing:

The Re-Elect George Dubya screensaver is getting some pretty negative reviews over at download.com. FormerRebublican writes....

This is the worst software ever. Since installing I lost my job to India, my child owes $24,000 plus interest to pay off the national debt and my buddy who got injured in Iraq came home to no job and no benefits. I tried to call tech support and was told I was an enemy combatant for calling to complaign.


And WoodyD was less than impressed...

I had selected a different screensaver to download but this one went ahead and installed itself anyway. Then it deleted all files related to healthcare, blocked me from entering my overtime hours, lied about the dangers imposed by viruses of mass destruction to install VMD software that doesn’t have an uninstall option, and accessed my PayPal account and sent all my money to Halliburton. The only good news is that this program is scheduled to be uninstalled on November 2.

It's not like I had a good answer to this, so I'm not sure it's actually bad news.

Sep 14 - Portions of Iraq’s Sunni minority who live in the more rebellious population centers may be disenfranchised, US-installed interim Prime Minister told The Australian in an exclusive interview. Allawi insisted that elections would go on as planned, but said they might not be possible in some unstable cities.

"If for any reason 300,000 people cannot vote because terrorists decide so," Allawi said, "then frankly 300,000 people... is not going to alter 25 million people voting. What we are after really is implementing the political process."

Of course there are many Shia who won't be upset - who figured the Sunni would be an outnumbered and powerless minority in any event. If Allawi is serious about making democracy work, this increases the need to make them feel included. I honestly don't know how. I gather he's trying to reach out to those, Sunni and Shia, who support the insurgency. I can't find many details in English language sources - but if he knows what he's doing it could be great news.

What's the matter with Kansas is the best book on politics I've read this year. I reviewed it on Epinions.

Since this isn't a mystery novel, I'll give away the ending, although it means a lot less without the supporting evidence and information that make up most of this book. The poorest people in the heartland are angry at what is happening to them in today's economy - the same anger that happened early in the century when communism was still popular in Kansas in some places. Somehow the anger has become refocused, so the more downtrodden they feel, the more they try to assert their own authenticity and dignity by supporting conservative religious and even economic causes. They cannot be more successful than the rich, but they can be more religious and authentic. There is a real rivalry between rich and poor - but somehow the poor express it by trying to be more conservative than the rich. Many of the rich are uncomfortable with the strident fundamentalism, but in the end reasonably content to benefit from their economic policies. Sometimes he comes close to saying the rich are manipulating the poor, more often implying that many understand and perpetuate the system but did not set it up.

I love this book, but the one thing the author doesn't do is offer a prescription. I have a starting point for the discussion, although I'm not an expert on the heartlands. I think we need to think about how antipoverty programs can be changed to make sure they help rural regions. Although the heartlands do get more tax money than they pay out, this might be the difference between some districts considering these 'liberal' programs and considering them their programs. Even to have the Democratic party talking about these areas might help.

I just picked up the latest twists on the National Guard memos from this Sideshow post by Avedon Carol. CBS is still defending the memos. I couldn't quite buy The Poor Man's argument that the memos must be OK because the Right is always wrong about this stuff. Daily Kos studies the details and believes the memos genuine, although he concedes we will know in a few days.

I can't decide between believing it must be a false alarm because no forger would be too lazy to get an old fashioned typewriter, and believing that it must be a forgery because while this all undoubtedly happened nobody would have made records of it. Either way it's hard for me to get excited - after all, the memos are not the main basis for believing Bush is a child of priviledge who took frequent advantage of the fact. A forgery might show something important about someone on the left, maybe even CBS news.

U.S. Forces Take Action in Areas Dominated by Iraqi Insurgents

So nobody is trying to claim that all this talk about our losing territory is just in the imagination of the media. Good start.

I've been wondering if both the US and Allawi had decided that a 'strongman' was preferable to elections. These attempts to regain territory so all of Iraq can vote might mean I was wrong - or they might be intended as an excuses to say we tried. Or Allawi may want one thing and our government another. Or our government may have different groups with different plans. It doesn't seem the Sunni triangle will see urgency in creating conditions for an election either. If they are not willing to accept the results of an election dominated by Shia, they might rather have an excuse to reject that election.

I hope I'm wrong, but the odds of a generally accepted January Iraq election seem rather slim. I don't know who might have the stature to replace Allawi even if Allawi intended to permit such a thing. I can't envision any of this happening, and can't guess at the result if it did.

How about if elections are postponed again and again? What sort of leader will Allawi be? Much of what you hear about him is hard to track down the source of, but this New Yorker article names names:

But his role as a Baath Party operative while Saddam struggled for control in the nineteen-sixties and seventies—Saddam became President in 1979—is much less well known. “Allawi helped Saddam get to power,” an American intelligence officer told me. “He was a very effective operator and a true believer.” Reuel Marc Gerecht, a former C.I.A. case officer who served in the Middle East, added, “Two facts stand out about Allawi. One, he likes to think of himself as a man of ideas; and, two, his strongest virtue is that he’s a thug.”

Early this year, one of Allawi’s former medical-school classmates, Dr. Haifa al-Azawi, published an essay in an Arabic newspaper in London raising questions about his character and his medical bona fides. She depicted Allawi as a “big husky man . . . who carried a gun on his belt and frequently brandished it, terrorizing the medical students.” Allawi’s medical degree, she wrote, “was conferred upon him by the Baath party.” Allawi moved to London in 1971, ostensibly to continue his medical education; there he was in charge of the European operations of the Baath Party organization and the local activities of the Mukhabarat, its intelligence agency, until 1975.

“If you’re asking me if Allawi has blood on his hands from his days in London, the answer is yes, he does,” Vincent Cannistraro, the former C.I.A. officer, said. “He was a paid Mukhabarat agent for the Iraqis, and he was involved in dirty stuff.” A cabinet-level Middle East diplomat, who was rankled by the U.S. indifference to Allawi’s personal history, told me early this month that Allawi was involved with a Mukhabarat “hit team” that sought out and killed Baath Party dissenters throughout Europe. (Allawi’s office did not respond to a request for comment.) At some point, for reasons that are not clear, Allawi fell from favor, and the Baathists organized a series of attempts on his life. The third attempt, by an axe-wielding assassin who broke into his home near London in 1978, resulted in a year-long hospital stay.

Doesn't sound great.

This is a test of the emergency polling system. In the event of a real emergeny, don't sit around taking polls.

The constitutional right to bear arms means that Government cannot regulate or monitor what weapons you own. The stuff about a well regulated militia explains but does not limit. The guys who didn't define well regulated militia might disagree among themselves what it implied, but the founding fathers would have found some weapon owners not to be well regulated under some circumstances. You can only bear portable weapons. No tanks, air craft carriers, or hydrogen bombs. A small nuke might be OK if you carry it around. Arms only referred to stuff in existance when the constitution was written. No semiautomatic weapons. You can defend yourself with the claws of a dead grizzly bear, but not firearms.

Alexa has made some changes again. Besides the lamentable alphabetical picks, I'm again paired with The Sideshow by Avedon Carol. This blog is a good source for roundups of good posts from the liberal side of the blogosphere, but I was still a little surprised. I rarely do roundups, and I try to bend over backwards when I fear partisanship might make me fail to see weakness in a liberal position.

Alexa usually pairs me with liberals - perhaps because conservatives are less likely to read a blog they disagree with than liberals? I can't imagine this applying to Drezner or his readers though. Hmmm. Maybe just a statistical artifact.

Any Sideshow readers want to say hello?

Even Fox news doesn't consider most of what the Bush administration calls good news in Iraq headline material. While it is heartwarming to build a school or a well in a place where attacks on Americans are uncommon, it doesn't really presage anything great in terms of rebuilding the country and economy of Iraq and creating jobs for those students - which requires ending the civil war. In America, very few conservatives would consider the fact that government was spending money on schools to be good news - they would ask how effective those schools really were. In Iraq, we must ask that - and also what jobs will be available to educated students.

Nevertheless, the New York Times has decided this is actually news:

This week, pursuing a similar strategy in Sadr City, where official agencies have been afraid to operate, the interim prime minister, Ayad Allawi, dangled the prospect of hundreds of millions of dollars in construction aid if local leaders would sideline Mr. Sadr and his militia.

In that dismal Baghdad neighborhood, which houses more than 2.5 million Shiite Muslims, the Army-sponsored sewage repair is one of only a handful the Americans have been able to start. Alluding to the continuing tensions, an Army spokesman said construction work in Sadr City was "very limited due to current activities."

Perhaps they are right. Allawi does seem to know what he's doing. Yesterday there was another article in the NY Times:

Militia Leaders Charging Betrayal by Iraqi Premier

It couldn't happen to a nicer bunch of guys. Allawi does seem smarter than Bush - and if it weren't for the rest of the history of the occupation of Iraq, the Bush administration might deserve a lot of credit for choosing him, although that would still depend on two things.

He does seem to know who to negotiate with, but he hasn't yet proved himself capable of the Herculian never-yet-accomplished task of preventing civil war without Saddam's brand of mass murder. If he's that pragmatic, is he idealistic enough to want to give up power to an elected government? Even some Americans seem to want a strong man - but if that's in the cards, every promise we make about an elected government is building more trouble for the future.

It does begin to seem the future of Iraq depends on Allawi. His history is well worth researching and blogging about. Anyone care to join me?

I do not accuse Arnaud de Borchgrave and all those who talk of the Tet Syndrome of lying, or even making assertions which have no evidence to support them. I accuse them of talking about any claim that supports their purposes as a proven fact if their are any experts who believe it, and ignoring all other evidence and informed opinion. I accuse them of accepting all positive media coverage as their natural right, and attributing all negative media coverage to bias without investigating the possibility that the media is discussing real problems - or that war proponents played a role in unreasonable media expectations.

I call this Tonkin Syndrome. There were reasons to believe American ships had been attack by North Vietnam - but also reasons to believe otherwise. There were steps that could have been taken to ascertain the truth before acting. There were those who already believed miltary action was appropriate, and perhaps even that a war started under a misapprehension would be no bad thing. Nobody noticed how easily the press had accepted their claims - and nobody would remember later why the press did not always trust the government.

When he writes that a reminder about what led to the U.S. defeat in Southeast Asia is timely, Borchgrove gives no hint that he is reminding us of a controversial theory which is rejected even by many people who supported the Vietnam war while it was happening but reexamined it later. He portrays the Tet Offensive as a brilliant victory for the South Vietnamese government and the United States war effort which would have lead to victory if not for the efforts of the liberal media, especially Walter Cronkite. The only thing that kept us from victory is collapse on the home front.

Even most of those who believe we could have won the Vietnam war don't believe that - although they usually consider it a factor. Here is a sample that is more typical:

But if it means very little to say that the war was unwinnable, what does it mean to say that it was winnable? It means that had the U.S. military and its civilian masters better understood the nature of the Vietnam War, they could have devised tactics to deal with it. There is nothing inevitable about stupidity among people in uniform, nor about feckless secretaries of state or presidents passively accepting bad advice. The tactics pursued by the U.S. military between 1965 and 1968 were downright counterproductive. But even in 1968 it would have been possible to correct those errors— at a price. (Certainly, too, since the war at its end resembled not so much a “people’s war” as an old-fashioned conventional war complete with tanks and artillery, the U.S. Army— had it still been around for the fight— surely could have stopped the North Vietnamese army.)

When one speaks of costs, however, one must never leave out the matter of politics. Because the Vietnam War did not involve survival interests for the United States, it was always necessary to consider the price of gaining a strategically important, but not critical, goal. U.S. leaders, as politicians are wont to do, chalked up “costs” not only in terms of casualties and money, but also their own political fortunes.

In sum, had it not been for a concatenation of bad military tactics, civilian overseers who failed in their duty to drag decent advice out of the uniformed military, the wavering of Lyndon Johnson’s Wise Men, Richard Nixon’s desire to shape a quick “opening” to China, and then his self-inflicted problems over Watergate, the Vietnam War actually could have been “won” at least to the degree that the Korean War was not lost.

A complete survey of the scholarly literature on Vietnam is beyond me, but I'd like to talk briefly about an article by former Vietanm hawk Guenter Lewy, published in that pinko rag Parameters, the Journal of the US Army War College. Some of what he has to say may seem harsh, but that should not surprise us. Historically, armies which honestly examined their defeats have often gone on to victory, while those who have found others to blame tend not to.

Professor Lewy talks about American equipment the South Vietnamese could not use and maintain properly, and lack of training and morale in the lower ranking troops. He also talks about corruption and the percerption of corruption by the Vietnamese people in the upper ranking officers and the South Vietnamese government, especially President Thieu and certain generals. He talks about various claims that the military could not win the war because they were not allowed to - and the real reasons we did what we did. The reason we did our bombing the way we did was not because of anti-war liberals, it was because of a real fear that the war might widen to include China. Right or wrong, the restrictions had nothing to do with opposition to the Vietnam war. I'm not going to try to summarize the whole article here, but unlike Borchgrave he examines opposing claims.

It is easy to forget that when LBJ said "If I've lost Cronkite, I've lost middle America", and "If I've lost Cronkite, I've lost the war" it was because he had considered Walter Cronkite an ally up until then. If the initial invasion had not been based on the Tonkin resolution, if he had told the American people to expect the casualties of a Tet offensive, would they have accepted the war? If so, then the Tet offensive would not have turned Cronkite and America. If not, many lives would have been saved.

Borchgraves essay has been blogged about a number of times - all in basic agreement. When googling Tet Syndrome I found not one word of caution. Only when I googled Vietnam revisionism did I find critical discussions of the sort of claims Borchgrave makes. This post in Useful Fools swallows Borchgraves uncritically - and provides a list of symptoms for Tet syndrome which pretty much excludes the possibility to a Democratic society deciding a war was a mistake without his diagnosing Tet syndrome. He links to similar ideas (assuming the idea of the Tet syndrome without a direct link to Borchgrave) by Bill Quick. Anti-Anti-Flag links to the list of symptoms found in Useful Fools, which is even more sweeping than what Borchgraves claims. PunditReview blames it all on Ted Kennedy. Cold fury paraphrases:These people snatched defeat from the jaws of victory; they refused to learn the lessons of history, both military and political.

Oddly enough, you will find more if you google. I have seen amazing discoveries in the blogosphere - and severe groupthink. I think we can do better.