An open letter to the New York Times:

Dear Editors:

I'm certain you're getting a great deal of mail about this already, but let me add my voice to those decrying Thomas Friedman's outrageous claim that "[l]iberals don't want to talk about Iraq because, with a few exceptions, they thought the war was wrong and deep down don't want the Bush team to succeed."

It is true that I thought - and think - that the Iraq war was a titanically misguided and hamfistedly-prosecuted diversion from what America needed to be doing in the aftermath of the September 11th attacks. It is also true that I regard the Bush Administration's stated aims in Iraq through gimlet eyes - in other words, it's not so much that I don't want them to succeed, as that I'm afraid of what "success" on their terms would mean for America.

But to assert that "liberals don't want to talk about Iraq"? Well, that's just ludicrous...

Here's an interesting story from Battlefront Iraq:

http://www.salon.com/news/wire/2005/06/10/inquiry/index.html

The article is about an explosion of currently unknown origin at a forward operating base dubbed (with apparent accuracy) "Danger," and it goes on to note that the explosion claimed two victims, who just happened to be the company CO and XO.

Reading between the lines, I can only assume that CID - the Army's Criminal Investigation Division - is involved because there is a reasonable suspicion that these men were "fragged." And fragging, it seems to me, is a sure sign of an unpopular war.

If you're like me, you've seen a boatload of great ideas about how to respond to this nightmare we find ourselves in popping up here and elsewhere on the Web in the last 24 hours.

Economic warfare. Reframing the terms of debate. A Goldwateresque, decades-long project of institution-building and networking.

All intriguing and necessary ideas. But they're all too often undermined for me by a comment appended to them by their authors: "If only Barack Obama..." or "Hillary..." or "Howard..." would pick this up and run with it.

With all due respect to those worthies: Fuck that. It's as if the people giving birth to these amazing and powerful insights aren't aware of their own power.

Brilliant line. It's starting to show up in Kerry's standard stump speech, and I say: about time.

About time the man finds one short, punchy ("It's the economy, stupid") formulation to summarize his value proposition to the American voter.

In the business world, we call this "the elevator pitch," and this is the first time in the campaign Kerry's been able to find one.

When the final toll of this war is counted, we can't forget to add the hundreds or thousands killed by eminently preventable outbreaks of infectious disease, in this case Hepatitis E.

This outbreak of the disease, which is caused by ingestion of virus-laden sewage, has as its proximate cause the complete breakdown of the Iraqi water infrastructure. The efficient cause, of course, was the US bombardment, including as one of its features a deliberate attempt to degrade and deny that infrastructure.

So is anyone else sick of this yet?

We were promised, setting out into the stilled chaos of Manhattan traffic this morning, that this terror alert was different - that it was based on specific intelligence about specific targets. We reassured each other, between nervous titters in midtown offices, that looking silly and being prudent was better than being foolhardy and winding up dead. We reasoned, as we asked the cab driver to turn three blocks out of the way to avoid Lexington (and Citicorp Center), that after all they wouldn't shut the Lincoln Tunnel to truck traffic if they didn't have some mighty compelling reason to do so.

Now it turns out that the ostensible Al Qaida target reconnaissance was three, maybe four years old: conducted, that is, before September 11th, 2001.

I guarantee it:

Here for you now is the definitive transcription of John Kerry's acceptance speech. Accept no substitutes.

(In the tradition of Mission of Burma, and to my ear not a little reminiscent of Gang of Four as well.)

Yes yes.

Hmm. Seems some critical material has, uh, "gone missing" from the Los Alamos national labs.

(More here and here and here.)

Cheery, no? T'anks and praise to M'sieur Mowder.

Looka here: Nicholas Kristof of the NYT, usually so clear in his thought, tut-tuts that Michael Moore is taking the left to a new low by calling G.W. Bush a "liar."

Now, I like Kristof, ordinarily. I think he and Krugman are the two remaining spots of sanity on the Grey Lady's op ed pages (I never have cared very much for Bob Herbert, but you can throw him in there as well). I even wrote him a letter just last week praising his - yes - clarity on Darfur.

But come on now, Nick. This Administration has been caught in lies not once, not twice, but many times. Not on small things, either, but on things like whether or not they claimed, in the runup to war, that Saddam had tried to buy yellowcake from Niger, or had deep institutional continuity with al-Qaeda. These are not "misstatements of fact," they are not "incorrect characterizations." Let us call them for what they are: lies.

Scion of the Earnhardt clan, NASCAR's #8, Dale Jr., has gone and recommended "Fahrenheit 9/11" as something "all Americans should watch."

Now, I'm no NASCAR fan, but it seems to me that this is a brave, contrarian stance.

I know he's taking heat for it, too, from the more conservative elements of his fanbase, so went to Junior's site and thanked him. Might be nice if you did the same.

Take a look at this: it seems like the US economy actually grew much more slowly during the first part of the year than the numbers Bushco trumpets would indicate.

What does this remind me of? Oh yeah: the recent State Department admission that last year's terrorism fatalities, too, were far worse than originally reported.

Two facts do not a trend make, of course. But boy oh boy am I willing to bet that, when the dust has all settled and the actual facts are compiled by neutral onlookers, the (single-term!) George W. Bush Administration will turn out to have been even more damaging than we now understand.

What is now "highly partisan rhetoric" will come to be seen, in the fullness of time, as dispassionate recountings of the actual facts on the ground. Sadly, even some of the tinfoil-hat stuff will probably emerge as essentially accurate on the facts.

Question for those who remember: wasn't this the case with Watergate? Weren't even the things which seemed like the more lurid suppositions at the time later proven to be fundamentally accurate, even tepid?