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October 02, 2004

Kerry takes the Global Test; Bush fails him

: I knew that Bush would waste no time rubbing Kerry's generous nose in the concept of a "global test." The Bush campaign just released a new commercial. My transcription:

:He said he's attack terrorists who threaten America. But at the debate, John Kerry said America must pass a 'global test' before we protect ourselves. The Kerry Doctrine: A Global Test. So we must seek permission from foreign governments before protecting America? So America will be forced to wait while threats gather? President Bush believes decisions about protecting America should be made in the Oval Office, not foreign capitols.

I could call that restrained. I'm half surprised they didn't paste up a picture of Jacques Chirac and call him Kerry's boss.

Meanwhile, on Kerry's site, his followup to the debate on this topic:

The threat of terrorism demands alliances on a global scale - to utilize every available resource to get the terrorists before they can strike at us. As president, John Kerry will lead a coalition of the able - because no force on earth is more able than the United States and its allies.

What the heck does that mean? The able are able? Get this man an adman.

: UPDATE: I'm watching Bill Maher's show on rerun. He thinks Bush was no worse than he ever is and that Kerry was too nice. "John Kerry's position on the war is 'foreigners like me better.'"

Tucker Carlson says: "I'm not convinced that all people want freedom as much as we think they want it."

Now that is the opinion of a guy in a bow tie.

: Next Carlson says that a reporter has the right to report the "truth" even if it endangers troops.

Bow tie's tied too damned tight.

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Blair's heart v. a tabloid's soul

: Drudge and the Sunday Mail are trying to act as if Tony Blair's heart condition is a scandal and a secret. That's a load of crap. Says Drudge:

DOWNING Street tonight is embroiled in sensational claims that Tony Blair risked his life by trying to hush up the true scale of his heart problems....

Instead, for criminally irresponsible political reasons, Mr Blair s office refused to acknowledge the scale of the health problems, he said. Dr Ward also claims Mr Blair was pressurised not to disclose his illness or seek the best treatment for fear of causing a national scare.

Utter cardiac crap.

I have the same condition -- an occasional irregular heartbeat (which, in my case, developed after I was given a drug -- a "beta antagonist" in a lung test because of the gunk I inhaled on 9/11). It's bothersome and inconvenient as hell and even depressing but it's not immediately life-threatening, my doctors have assured me frequently. Ventricular fibrilation can kill you quickly, yes. But with atrial fibrillation, the real threat is that pools of blood can build clots while the heart is in afib (as we call it) and once the heart kicks back into regular rhythm, those clots can cause a stroke. But the risk of that happening is not until more than 24 hours after the onset of afib and even so, one can be given anticoagulants or the heart can be treated well in advance of the day mark.

Blair has had only a few reported incidents. The treatment for both looks extreme to my amateur eyes, in comparison only to what I've seen in my case and others I know about from research (and from blog friends). In his last episode, Blair had cardioversion -- that is, they shocked the heart into behaving. (I'm surprised Drudge and the Mail didn't shout: Blair Has Shock Therapy! Shades of Eagleton!) This week, they stuck a needle into his heart to burn out a few nerves that cause fibrillation and that usually cures it. But it's not often done unless afib has become so chronic as to interfere with life. In Blair's case, I can imagine that he didn't want it to interfere with the job and thus went the extra mile to get rid of it.

In the midst of afib, I've worked, driven, eaten hot dogs, gone to Starbucks, and, yes, blogged. It does not interfere with functioning. It feels pretty weird to have your heart going at a rapid rate and whumping with irregular beats but what's most upsetting is the idea of it and the possibility of interrupting the day with a visit to the doctor.

So don't buy what Drudge and the Mail are trying to feed you. I'm certainly not a doctor and don't pretend to be an expert at this. But I have gone through a half-dozen episodes since 2001 -- more than Blair -- and I'm still blogging away ... fact-checking asses an ocean away.

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Birds of a feather stonewall together

: Tom Brokaw stupidly sides with fellow anchor Dan Rather against the people he is supposed to serve:

Brokaw criticized what he called an attempt to "demonize" CBS and Rather on the Internet, the place where the first complaints about the report were raised and heavily debated.

"What I think is highly inappropriate is what going on across the Internet, a kind of political jihad ... that is quite outrageous," the NBC anchor said.

"It is certainly an attempt to demonize CBS News and it goes well beyond any factual information a lot of them has, the kind of demagoguery that is unleashed out there."

Tom has been reading too much Tina Brown and listening too little to America.

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More Audible notes

: Audible just put up the first Presidential debate for free. I plan to listen again. If you see a pencil-necked geek running down a street in New Jersey too early screaming at the air about terrorism and the French and all that, check to see whether he's listening to an iPod before coming to the conclusion that he's nuts.

: Audible just put up the unabridged version of Bill Clinton's autobiography. I listend to the abridged version, which he read, and enjoyed it. This version is 24 hours long. Even for a Clinton fan....

: I have been trying to listen to David Brooks' Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There. I praised Brooks to high heaven below and said when he's good he's great. What I left unsaid this time is that when he's bad he's awful. And I can't get through Bobos. It's not just his presentation -- with all the amateur actors' emoting of a guest-star spot on The Love Boat -- it's his worldview. He thinks that America used to be run by an aristocracy and so now he's surprised it is run by bohemians. I don't know where Brooks is from (he went to the University of Chicago) but he sounds like an Upper East Sider who never left and never met anyone who didn't go to Choate.

The problem with a bad audiobook is that it's like being stuck in an elevator with somebody boring. They won't shut up. They just keep droning. Like Brooks himself, when an audiobook is good, it's great; when it's bad, it's a bore.

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It's about oil, stupid

: David Isenberg points out, quite rightly, that the debate left out a very important and central word to a proper discussion of foreign affairs today: oil.

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Audible does not suck

: A few months ago, I wrote a few very frustrated posts about Audible. I couldn't get it to work on my Treo and found the help and customer service lacking (to put it nicely). I wanted to get the service to work and give them money and couldn't and it drove me crazy.

I broke down and bought an iPod and now Audible works for me.

I'm addicted to it. Which is to say, it doesn't suck.

I'm setting the record straight because it's the good and proper thing to do and because I will be writing about podcasting shortly. Creating content for the iPod platform is an important evolution in media.

I listen to books and even to convention speeches and 9/11 Commission testimony that Audible got up promptly.

I still have a few complaints about Audible -- but they're the good kind of complaints. For example:

I want more books. I'm having trouble finding enough to listen to for my taste.

I wish it were easier to browse the titles. They need to invest more in packaging and promotion (for example, look at what's newsworthy and you hardly ever see anything new; look at new and you see so much new that you wish it were categorized for easier browsing).

And -- this is more iTunes' fault, I'll bet -- I wish it were easier to move a book from Audible to iTunes (you can't use the Audible software to sync the iPod if you use iTunes, which, of course, everyone does; so you have to download the file via Audible and then go into iTunes and find it in Windows messy directories and then plop it into an overcrowded folder with everything you own and then find it and move it to a playlist... whew).

All those complaints only indicate that I'm using the service and like it. I'll still advise a bit more effort in customer service. I was a clearly exasperated customer and never did get a solution to my Treo problem; I gave up on the company and screamed about it here. I heard that the head of the company was mad at me about it. That's like Dan Rather being mad at the bloggers who found the truth he missed. If a customer complains about a company, that probably means that the customer wants to patronize and like the company but is being frustrated. The wise company will go deal with that. I got around Audible's problems on my own and proved that, indeed, I was a customer with pent-up money. I'll be there are more like me out there....

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I'm not undecided, I'm unhappy II

: When David Brooks is good, he's great. Today's column is a superb analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of both candidates for President and says much better than I did why this is such a troubling choice.

Kerry can't make a decision; Bush makes them too quickly. Kerry changes his mind by the month; Bush almost never changes his mind. Kerry thinks obsessively about process questions, but can't seem to come up with a core conviction; Bush is great at coming up with clear goals, but is not so great about coming up with the process to get there.

That's right about both men. It has a broad impact on how they would govern: Bush is better at stating principle but, judging by the followup in Iraq, not so good at executing the principle. Kerry is incapable of stating principle -- he seems almost scared of it -- and though he is unproven at executive-level execution, he is at least analytical, as Brooks says.

This also has a specific impact on how they view the war on terror. Says Brooks:

On Thursday night, Bush defined the war on terror as a broad moral and ideological struggle. He said, "We have a solemn duty to defeat this ideology of hate."

Bush believes that Iraq is a crucial battlefield in the war because a free Iraq will be a rebuttal to radical Islam right in the heart of the Arab world.

Kerry, on the other hand, defined the enemy in narrow, concrete terms. He emphasized that it was Osama bin Laden who attacked us. He emphasized the need to defeat Al Qaeda's network. He called Iraq a diversion from defeating that network.

And this is precisely why I had such a problem with the debate: I agree with Bush, as Brooks states it, and disagree with Kerry. Note that the 9/11 Commission, for its many fans, also agreed with Bush in saying that the enemy is Islamic fascism.

Brooks is critical of both men's styles. He says that because Kerry cannot blend his specific analyses into larger guiding principles, that is the reason he can change his mind on issues to effortlessly. He says that Bush, on the other hand, is stubborn ("steadfast and resolute" were his words, actually) and as a result:

Bush launched a pre-emptive war even though his intelligence community was incompetent. He occupied a country even though he didn't really believe in, or work with, the institutions of government he would need to complete the task.

Nonetheless, I suspect that the reason Bush's approval ratings hover around 50 percent, despite a year of carnage in Iraq, is because of the reason many of us in the commentariat don't like to talk about: in a faithful and moralistic nation, Bush's language has a resonance with people who know that he is not always competent, and who know that he doesn't always dominate every argument, but who can sense a shared cast of mind.

What I have been dying to hear from Kerry is overall principle about fighting terrorism -- not just bin Laden -- and about nurturing democracy in the Middle East but instead, all I hear is his analysis of what Bush did wrong. And Bush did things wrong. And that's why I remain, not undecided but unhappy with our choice.

: UPDATE: Andrew Sullivan links to Brooks' column and adds:

But what strikes me in Brooks' defense of Bush is how it's traditionally a liberal defense of a liberal president. It's liberalism that has historically enunciated grand, abstract themes and conservatism that has always emphasized the difficulty of translating abstraction into reality, of finding the proper means to achieve certain ends, of the limits of our intellect when faced with the world of practical life. In that philosophical sense, it is Kerry who is the practical conservative in this race; and Bush who is the airy-fairy idealist.

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