Make of it what you will.

This link makes it 34 trackbacks… and probably growing.

Do I care? … Barely.

The dumb-bell shaped map brings me to this rebuttal from the “Centrist corner” of the American political blog scene.

Myself? All the Shah’s Men is the best book from the list. In fact, I’ll go and place it on the sidebar over there.

I’ve read a handful of the books, and it’s not too difficult to figure out which side of the bell those handful come from. But I don’t have too much use for most of these books.

This list is interesting. But I’m puzzled by why he would put Dick Morris as the arbitrator of good faith in his battle.

The Democratic Primary Voter has puzzled me. According to the chattering class, according to the exit and enterance polls, and according to conventional wisdom they’ve gravitated over to “Mr. Electable”, John Kerry.

How… is… John… Kerry… electable?

(1) He suffers from the Dukakis problem. In 1988, Lee Atwater handed Jim Pinkerton(*) a 3 by 5 inch card and asked for a bullet point by bullet point reference guide for talking points on Dukakis negatives, easy for Bush I to digest. It’s easy to see Karl Rove creating that very list right now on an exact replica of the notecard… except this time he may just well not bother giving it to Bush II and just hand it to Roger Ailes at Fox News. Start by slurring Massachusetts in general, and referencing Kerry’s “Liberal Elitist” aristocratic appearance. Move on to the silly social wedge issue. In 1988, it was Dukakis’s civil libertarian stand on flag burning and being “against the Pledge of Allegiance” by signing legislation allowing children to not have to say it. In 2004: Gay marriage. Don’t necessarily have to take it head-on (don’t want to alienate the soccer mom too much… no strike that, now they’re supposedly “Security Mom”s), but… just keep it there in the news. National Security? Why, I hear Kerry voted against CIA funding back at the end of the Cold War!

(2) He suffers from Al Gore’s problem. Riding onto the Tonight Show with Jay Leno on a motorcycle? Staged. Cursing for Rolling Stones Magazine? Huh? Whazza? Earth-tones, anyone? Add to it the general “Insider” point of reference, no over-arching “Vision” and a large need to “play it safe” and calculate the percentages out as to what comments will please and/or offend what percentage of this segment of the voting population…. necessary, I suppose, except you need to make it look like that is not what you are doing… Granted, Al Gore somehow won the popular vote and arguably the electoral vote, but he did so largely in spite of himself.

(3) HE RAN AN UNINSPIRING CAMPAIGN. He impressed NOBODY in 2003. Or did I miss something? I know that nobody was paying attention, but I, to a larger extent than others, was. Supposedly he works best when his “back is against the wall”. I … guess… so. He emerged from a crowded field at the top in a nomination process designed for the early war of attrition, and thus has been crowned. How am I to expect that he won’t repeat the lousy campaign that he ran in 2003 in the year 2004?

The political masses are playing “Pundit”. (Why and how? I can’t really speculate on the matter.) And they’re playing “pundit” based on what the chattering classes have prognosticated… I’m not sure that the political masses would be aware that Dean is “Unelectable” if the chattering classes had not pontificated on the question. And I’m not sure if they would have deemed Kerry as “Electable” if the chattering classes had not deemed it so. Does this make any sense?

(*)Updated: Pinkerton just wrote an editoral lombasting the Bush Big Budget. Skip to the final paragraph of page 2 for all ye know and all ye need know.

National Review, of course, is staunchly pro-Bush.

Good stuff. Or at least Good Stuffing.

To be honest, my expectations were low.

But you see… Georgie benefits from “low expectations”.

Bush will never be a silver-tongued smoothie, but there’s a benefit to that. He also never sounds rehearsed – and no amount of rehearsal is likely to change that.

Put another way: the man is inarticulate.

A pundit-type just said to me: “If he loses this year, this will be the day he lost it.”

Nay. That would be the State of the Union Speech… wherein he stood up against “Big Steroid”. But maybe the MTP appearance will be the day he was unable to “stop the bleeding”???

I’m taking comfort in the fact its Sunday morning and most people were doing something other than watching meet the press.

Now that’s thinking positively!

President Bush looks like he’s afraid of Tim Russert. He’s stammering and unsteady. For the first time, I’ve felt a twinge of fear myself about the November election.

No need to worry. We’ve got Kerry of all people as “Mr. Electable” on what’s obstensibly “my” side.

The sainted President Reagan failed to do that, opting for a “Morning in America” touchy-feely campaign. As a result, the Iran-Contra incident could be treated as a “scandal” when a more thematically principled campaign would have afforded The President a policy base from which he could have either (a) provided substantive help to the Contras or (b) mounted a sound policy defense to the initiatives he did take.

I don’t want to touch that one.

I kept wincing as the president bobbled his answers. Even when he gave what on paper is a decent enough answer, he looked nervous, stumbly and intellectually unsure. He did himself no favors with this interview. I know Bush is not known for being eloquent, but it did strike me that we should be able to expect better than this from the President of the United States, at least after three years in office.

Yeeash.

I wonder if Howard Dean looks into the mirror somberly, thinks about where his campaign was two months ago, thinks about the News-weekly covers, riding to a fateful meeting with Destiny,

then stares right into where his campaign is now, as it flails away to its sad disasterous conclusion in Wisconsin,

I wonder if he opens his mouth, and says:

“YAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!”

There’s word from the chattering classes that Dean has “not ruled out” a run as Kerry’s vice-president. This is an absurd news-story on the face of it. Months ago, we heard from the chattering classes some navel-gazing observations that they were in the “Silly Season” of Election-year political coverage… that, y’know: the coverage they’re entertaining about the Democratic Candidates and the speculation that they’re entertaining about what might happen or could happen if this or that happens is absurd on the face of it, but in the absense of any conclusive news, this is what they’re reporting.

But some news for everyone: It’s always Silly Season for the Chattering Classes.

#1: From the echo-chamber of Democrat-leaning blogs, in this case eminating from Talking Points Memo, we find hints that the Plame Affair is ready to flair up a bit. Y’know, the “16 little words”: “The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.” … the very phrasing of that sentence, which allowed George Tenet to agree to leave it in the State of the Union Speech being a tacit admission of guilt.

We shall see if Libby, mentioned from the start on Buchannan and Press, is grilled and thrown to the wolves or not.

In the meantime: Bob Novak is a partisan hack who has the same habits as he did during the Nixon Administration.

#2: The Commission looking into Intelligence is useless. The perimeters are tight. Silberman’s work speaks for itself. And John McCain’s performance here does not inspire confidence that he particularly cares.

#3: The Investigation looking into Janet Jackson’s Boob looks like it’s really going places. I hear Michael Powell, the head-honcho at the FCC, has performed a full frame-by-frame analysis of the incident.

How this manifests itself politically, I don’t know.

The President’s State of the Union Speech from 2003: found here.

The President’s State of the Union Speech from 2004 found here.

Commentary over here.

But enough about all that. Question: 99 words on the topic of steriods? (Flash over to Tom Brady.) STEROIDS??

His approval rating dropped after the speech, for what that’s worth.

Michael Ruppert said, during the rise of Howard Dean’s candidacy, that the Democratic Candidate would probably be John Kerry. “We always see these candidates that aren’t going to actually win.”

Either Alex Jones or him — I don’t remember– say that the powers that actually control the country are not happy with George W. Bush, and that if he’s elected we can expect him to be promptly kicked out of office … ala, say, Richard Nixon. (Though if that’s the case, we still have the problem with Cheney. But then again, everything Cheney touches seems to be tainted with corruption.

Now, as anyone who has seen the Portland Public Access presentation of old Michael Parenti lectures can tell you: pretty much every Washington politician, by definition of the fact that they’ve gotten so far up, has financial or other dirt on them that can be used to tear them out of office or leadership if … necessary.

But that’d be after the election, y’see. Though in this case, remember: John Kerry too is a Skull and Bones alumni as well as George W. Bush. Skull and Bones being the new FreeMasons, the new Council on Foreign Relations, the new [fill in the blank].

Jump over to Washington Representative Jim McDermott’s comments about Saddam Hussein’s capture, and consider them in light of the sudden bizarre certaintude of Bin Laden’s impending capture, all echoing Madeleine Albright’s off-the-record joke about “timing Bin Laden’s capture”, as well as the recent capture rumour and things get a little…

Silly, maybe?

The president currently enjoys a… 15… percent… approval rating among Canadians. (Among Americans, it’s 49 percent or thereabouts.)

We know that Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien didn’t bother to hide his preference that Al Gore win the election in 2000.

But the backlash sort of feeds into my theory. 2006 or 2008 will see a rather strong Isolationist backlash in the election: against our current neo-conservative defense policy (and possibly even the neoliberal “Internationalist” approach broached by the Democrats), against bi-partisan NAFTA-GATT free trade policy — as the manufacturing sector of the economy gets exported abroad, and against Immigration — Bush’s soft amnesty to get off the back of big business (ditto the Democrat’s more generous counter-proposal). At least electorally; the truth behind policy is that much of it seems like it is pretty well set in stone.

A complicated picture that goes beyond our tepid definitions of “left” “right” or to what degree the foreign world is acturally correct in their assessment of our political leadership. Resentments grow here in America over resentments grown abroad, and so Americans shrug and cling to thier (our) nationalistic identity.

John Kerry’s stump-speech applause line “BRING IT ON” is off the mark.

The Bush line that he ought to incorporate for himself is “Fool me Once, Shame on… Shame on… you? Fool me… Won’t Be Fooled Again.” Imagine the crowd’s applause, laughing at that bizarre bit of Bush speechery…

…And laughing at the man in front of them.

During the misery-inducing campaign through 2003, he awkwardly defended his “Yes” vote for the Iraqi War Resolution by saying that “Bush misled me.”

Neo-neo conservative pundit Christopher Hitchens penned this article, with the line “Vote for me. I’m easily fooled.” Somewhere I have an essay from within the last month from someone saying “If I Could figure it out without having access to top-secret Intelligence briefings…”

But the deed is done, and we meander forward.