My god -- Robert George has just ripped George W. a new one

OMG!!! LOL! It's the new Marxism.

What I have trouble following is the rubbish on undecided voters. Every one of them I see interviewed on TV impresses me as someone who is either a lip-service Republican or someone working up the gumption to invoke some dumb reason not to vote, or a combination of the two.

There'll be a torrent of them if Bush loses (or if it becomes obvious that he'd going to). Otherwise, not many.

Not to sound flippant, but you're saying that nobody there would bother to think about it if they read it, or can't in the first place?

(The Max Boot mention makes me think I believe I read somewhere he's also not voting Bush, though.)

There'll be a torrent of them if Bush loses (or if it becomes obvious that he'd going to). Otherwise, not many.

Here's to the torrent, then.

Lots of things have no immediately apparent impact at this stage. What did the Duelfer report do? Largely, it was interpreted as a big zero for the Bush administration by the media. But the Wall Street Journal subsequently ran an editorial by a member of Duelfer's team who was righteously enraged that no one saw that what the Iraq Survey Group really found was that Hussein and him minions were still cooking up schemes to attack America. And that he had to be removed and the war was justified. Now, I've read the report and this is a very singular interpretation of it, but one generated from the inside.

It would not surprise me then that for the people who will vote for Bush, the Duelfer report's findings that Hussein had nothing and that the intelligence agencies worked from a great deal of fraudulent and mistaken information, has no traction. While those on the left hold it up as definitive proof that the war was based on lies, which is what I happen to believe.

Pages and pages can be written, and people infer from them based on what their groupthink is right now.

Is that significant? Does it worry you?

I very much agree, but I like the cognitive dissonance that results nonetheless in situations like these -- even if individual (and there are a couple of individuals I'll be passing this on to in particular). I note Goldberg hasn't said anything further on the blog or anywhere else apparently -- now, he could still be working on some sort of cohesive response, but I like the idea that he doesn't have one (so he probably shouldn't have said anything to start with).

The polls? I shrug at the polls. The only thing that will matter is what's on the day.

Speaking about the war on terrorism as the GOP convention kicked off, Bush told Matt Lauer on the "Today" show, "I don't think you can win it. But I think you can create conditions so that those who use terror as a tool are less acceptable in parts of the world." The White House immediately backpedaled from Bush's apparent gaffe, saying this was just a variation of what the president has always said--that the war on terrorism is a "different kind of war." But, as a former editor of this magazine, Michael Kinsley, once stated, "A gaffe is when a politician tells the truth." And that's just what Bush was doing.

I don't have much to say about this except that he is absolutely correct.

Ashcroft was essentially asserting that Congress--whose oversight powers give it authority to demand accountability from the executive--should not be allowed to inquire about the quality of legal advice being given to the president.

This bit interests me because it's exactly the same problem we have had in Britain; parliament gave Blair authority to go to war, but Blair refuses to let parliament know what legal advice was recieved and from whom he sought it, apart from the Lord Advocate. We have to take Blair's and the Lord Advocate's word that it was legal, but not be told how they came to that decision.

For the 40 years of the cold war, the United States held off a Soviet enemy that had the power to destroy the country several times over--yet civil liberties were never curtailed to the extent they are now.

I wasn't particularly convinced by this - though I'm sure it's true that civil liberties are being removed on a greater scale than ever before, the execution of the rosenbergs and the anti-communist withc hunts were not shining examples of liberty.

"The very core of liberty secured by our Anglo-Saxon system of separated powers has been freedom from indefinite imprisonment at the will of the Executive," concludes Scalia.

Obviously George never said this, only quoted it, and I only quote it because the use of Anglo-Saxon in this context mekes me nervous. Partly, of course, because Britain's seperation of power is quite different from the US'.

It is cold comfort that the furthest left and the furthest right justices on the Court are the ones arguing most vigorously about the dangers of an unchecked executive.

And, I think it's entirely what you should expect, and not just from the extremes, which I guess is the point of the artice. The things Bush is doing are things which any conservative worth their salt should be opposing. Okay, the Left maybe has a few extra problems with him (tax cuts for the rich, for example), but there are plenty of things he has done which have been considered a really bad idea by almost everyone in recent history, or at least and indication of bad government. Running up incredible debts, destroying the legal framework of your nation, sending troops unprepared and unecessarily into battle etc. - these are not things conservatives, or indeed anyone, should be supporting.

On a happier note, I was talking to some family friends of mine a few days ago (The father is a Reverend, and he was placed at a church in my town for a few years, and I went to school with the son.), they have been lifelong republicans (socially liberal, economically conservative) and the son said he is going to vote for Kerry, and the father said, while he's not sure he can bring himself to vote for Kerry, he certainly won't vote for Bush. So that cheered me up no end. As for whether articles like this will sway people, probably not, a least not those who are not politically active because they might never read them. But right wing thinkers might be swayed. Who knows...

The analogy doesn't go far enough. The war on terror, and the war on Iraq, have been passed to the polity as something that is similar to the threat posed by total nuclear annihilation. The Soviet Union's arsenal could do such a thing, Hussein didn't have anything like that power and certainly al Qaida does not.

Yet the government has been successful in convincing many people that they have a great deal to fear, perhaps more to fear than they did during the Cold War. The obsession with security and safety at every level that now exists most definitely did not exist during the Cold War.

This is the triumph of the current administration. It has been successful, along with the media, in turning this belief into a religion. And it's a religion, practically speaking, is based almost entirely only on one very bad day and thin air.

No one knows how to deal with it.

Translation: "If it rains, I'm staying home because I'm made of sugar and might melt in the rain. Heck, I'll probably stay home, anyway."

Heevahava #2: "Kerry is too liberal and Bush is too conservative and never the twain shall meet. We should have 'neither of the above' and try it again."

Translation: "Nothing's going to keep me from the two drink happy hour specials and pool at Dennahy's."

Trust me, my friend, my sense of black humor has helped keep me sane in a mad world. And yet I still have particularly strong beliefs that I do and will stand for.

It also includes this remarkable quote from an Arizona octogenarian: "'I listen to Rush Limbaugh when I'm in my car,' she said. 'We can only get one radio station really clear around here. It's so negative. I never heard a good thing about Kerry.'"

But she said she liked the Kerry she saw in the debates.