Delusions of Adequacy

Posting may be light for a few days, as I fight my second ear infection in three weeks. It's getting to the point where any change in weather (we are noticeably moving toward fall here; it's been downright chilly the last couple of mornings) puts my inner ear in an uproar.

Now, if I can only keep from changing elevations much for the next couple of weeks...

Ivan passed through, with heavy rains and occasional wind gusts.

On Thursday night, I thought the rains weren't that bad. Then I went out for breakfast at Shoney's (a regrettable decision) and saw that the rains had been worse than I thought. A particular bridge I cross almost every day, which usually stands about fifteen feet above the river below, now stands about three feet above it. The flood plains around the river are, in fact, flooded to an apparent depth of at least three or four feet.

On Sunday, it was worse, as run-off from higher elevations spilled into the area, swelling the river even higher. We're talking Mel Gibson/Sissy Spacek-type flooding. I'm really glad I didn't rent that little house down there on the flats along Highway 76...

If you aren't sure what I mean by the Gibson/Spacek comment above, just watch AMC sometime this month.

School is closing an hour and a half early here today, and will be out tomorrow. Thanks, Ivan!

Now, if only you can abstain from destroying my house or killing more people...

Via La Shawn Barber's Corner, shocking news: a Democratic video alleges that George W. Bush inherited a lot of money from his dad!

How dare he inherit his money, instead of getting it the honest way: by marrying a wealthy condiment-billionaire widow!

A real memo from the seventies has surfaced, which blasts Bush's service record. It's written by Bush's commanding officer and details how he neglected his duties.

Via Instapundit.

According to the Washington Post, CBS ignored its own experts who warned that documents purporting to be memos from TANG Lt Col Jerry Killian, George W. Bush's CO, were probably fake.

Note that Killian's secretary, a Bush-hater, says the memos were forged, though she thinks the forgeries reflect Killian's actual attitude on the matter.

Hugh Hewitt wants Congressional hearings, though others disagree with him. I tend to agree that as far as CBS is concerned, media attention is probably worse than congressional attention, so as long as WaPo, ABC, and NBC are beating up on them, hearings are probably a bad idea. That will doubtless change in the near future.

Via Instapundit, a FactCheck on Moveon PAC's new assault weapon ban ad.

The hysteria over the expiration of the ban is understandable, though. Remember the bad old days, before the ban, when there were firefights erupting on every street in America, and old people had to wear body armor to go to the store? Remember when everybody had an assault rifle, and drug gangs would go around buying them legally? Then remember how much better everything was when Clinton got the ban passed, and suddenly there was no more violent crime? Why, there haven't been any shootings in ten years, have there?

Well, it's all over now. Pretty soon, Atlanta will look like Sarajevo. Drat that Bush!

WaPo is not providing cover to CBS anymore on the Memogate fiasco. Powerline, the blog that broke the story of the fake memos, thinks the whole sorry affair is moving toward some kind of denouement.

If there were any justice, this would lead to the resignation of Dan Rather and Mary Mapes, and the pursuit of the documents right back to their law-breaking, federal document-forging source.

The great liberal hope on this one -- that the forgeries were actually planted by Karl Rove's operatives in an effort to discredit CBS -- seems a vanishingly small one to me. Surely if the source were a conservative, it would've been exposed immediately by CBS. No way they'd let themselves get pilloried the way they are, if a Republican could be blamed.

The other day, my good ultraliberal friend Sal said something in e-mail about Bush's service records, and how they've been released in fits and starts, rather than all at once. Today there's this from WaPo's Dana Milbanks (registration required). A couple of pertinent pull-quotes:

The White House is no longer saying the "entire file" has been released. In fact, the search for Bush's Guard documents continues -- and is being directed by a three-star general, according to a person with knowledge of the situation. White House communications director Dan Bartlett, who has coordinated the administration's statements on the issue, says: "My understanding is there is a constant review spearheaded by the FOIA [Freedom of Information Act] office at the Pentagon to ensure all documents are located."

What Bush did, which Kerry has not done, was sign release permission for his records that allowed anyone to request his records from the Pentagon. The problem is that those records are thirty years old, and buried in bankers' boxes. They've got people searching for them -- generals, even -- and as they're found, they're released. (Unless White House communications director Dan Bartlett sits on them, which he emphatically should not.)

NB that if Kerry had allowed release of his own records under the same FOIA mechanism, we would probably be seeing much the same thing, with flurries of documents being released piecemeal.

Via La Shawn Barber's Corner, this introduction to storyblogging by Donald Crankshaw.

Of course, this trope is familiar to those of us on Usenet's rec.arts.sf.starwars.misc, thanks to our sequence of horribly destructive Sith Wars.

These consensual, community-written spectacles of wit, warmth, and learning from each other began innocently enough, as an exchange of insults between two RASSMers. They have (d)evolved into galaxy-shattering epics of raw, intense stupidity. By some counts, there have been as many as twelve of them; personally, I only remember about three, though apparently I've been involved in five. My particular favorite was Sith War XII, aka the "Sith Bore," which ended just under a year ago. Read it in all its brilliance (it has the two Sith War posts of mine that I'm proudest of) at Rainbow Heron's Sith War archive site.

Sith Wars have taken on such a life of their own that one of RASSM's many highly-talented people, Chris Layne, is developing an animated version of them. See what he's got so far at his Sith War Adventures site.

The world trembles in anticipation of the next Sith War... though when it will come, and how our devastated psyches will handle it, no one can know.

New York Times book reviewer Michiko Kakutani has ripped into Kitty Kelley's "biography" of the Bush family, imaginatively titled The Family.

Kakutani takes particular offense at the slightness of the book, in view of the importance of the issues facing us in the upcoming election; she calls it

a perfect artifact of our current political culture in which unsubstantiated attacks on Senator John Kerry's Vietnam War record and old questions about President Bush's National Guard service get more attention than present-day issues like the Iraq war, the economy, intelligence reform or the assault weapons ban.

Later, Kakutani declaims:

Though Doubleday is promoting Ms. Kelley as "a master investigative biographer," she lavishes all too much of her admirable energy on trying to ferret out personal peccadilloes, ranging from drug and alcohol binges to temper tantrums, from weight problems to bad taste in gift-giving... Ms. Kelley's relentless concentration on these matters, often to the exclusion of far more serious issues, makes for a tacky, voyeuristic and petty-seeming narrative.

Kakutani points out Kelley's rap sheet:

Of course, the reader might well ask: what else could be expected from the author of earlier books like "Jackie Oh!" and "Elizabeth Taylor: The Last Star"? Ms. Kelley has always been better at dishing dirt than making sense of a subject's overall life.

Indeed.

Consider this timeline of the North Korean nuclear situation. Pay close attention to the entries for 1994 and 17 Sept 1999.

Now consider John Kerry's desire to offer nuclear fuel to Iran in order to "call their bluff" on their nuclear weapons program. (The first time I heard this proposal, in an NBC interview during the summer, I could not believe my ears. I never did quite believe that a candidate for President of the United States could ever propose such a jaw-droppingly stupid plan as offering nuclear fuel to Iran on the presupposition that if they really intended to develop weapons, they would not accept it, or would be unable to divert some of the spent fuel to weaponize it. I continued to not believe it until I read it for myself on Kerry's website. To my mind, this proposal alone disqualifies John Kerry from holding any elected office higher than Town Sump-Pump Polisher.)

Now consider Kerry's latest hissy-fit about how George Bush has not yet solved a problem created (or at least generously abetted) by the last Democratic administration.

Consistency, anyone?

If Kerry were honest, his next speech might go something like this:

"We excoriate George W. Bush for failing to do anything about this nuclear nightmare we created, and we promise to create more such nightmares when we are in office again."

The only thing that surprises me anymore about Kerry is how many otherwise sensible people seem ready to vote for him.

Many of the children who died in Beslan were Christians. At Desiring God (formerly Desiring God Ministries), John Piper has written an open letter of Christian condolence to their families.

You have not worked in vain. You have not raised little children in vain. Their lives are not wasted. Jesus is the resurrection and the life, though we die, we are alive. Believing in Christ, your children are alive, and will serve Christ meaningfully and joyfully this very day and forever.

Amen.

Foregoing any of the sort of apologia I suggest below, Dan Rather is sticking by his story. Emphatically. End of sentence.

Not only that, but he believes that there are

more important questions than how we got the story, which is where those who don't like the story like to put the emphasis, the more important question is what are the answers to the questions raised in the story, which I just gave you earlier.

When unpacked, this remarkable statement asserts that the veracity of the source is less important than the questions the memo raises. To believe this, you must ignore the fact that if the memos are fake, the questions they raise are absolutely moot. The answer to a false charge is that the charge is false. Duh.

Which is why I expect the Bush-haters to try again, and do it more carefully this time.

Hat tip to The Command Post.

I think that sometime in the next few days, CBS will announce that the memos aired on 60 Minutes II Wednesday night were indeed not 1972 originals, but copies of something -- transcribed notes from Killian's personal files, maybe, written up in Word by CBS staffers or later cataloguers of Killian's effects (though who that might be, besides Killian's family, who insist the memos are fakes, I wouldn't venture to guess). They'll produce new copies of the memos, probably done this time on whatever kind of typewriter Killian was known to have had in his office, and market them as "the originals."

Of course, this won't explain the numerous discrepancies in the text of the memo itself, as enumerated by Donald Sensing of One Hand Clapping (via the always excellent Belmont Club).

One thing I wonder about, not being a veteran nor having seen many military communications myself: In the memo ordering Bush to report for medical examination, the writer (whoever it was) uses the phrase "no later than" followed by the acronym (NLT). Why are both used? To my ear, this smacks of someone saying, "Here's some military jargon, and here's a translation for the uninitiated." And why, exactly, would the uninitiated be reading it? Could it be because the doc was meant to be read by the uninitiated?

Because the original article remains inaccessible due to being swamped by a Drudge link, I'm posting the entire text of an article making the rounds of the blogosphere, as presented on The Daily Recycler. It's also available at Wizbang, The Command Post, and Allah. Presented here FWIW; I didn't write this and make no claims about its veracity.

More than six weeks ago, an opposition research staffer for the Democratic National Committee received documents purportedly written by President George W. Bush’s Texas Air National Guard squadron commander, the late Col. Jerry Killian.

The oppo researcher claimed the source was “a retired military officer.” According to a DNC staffer, the documents were seen by both senior staff members at the DNC, as well as the Kerry campaign.

“More than a couple people heard about the papers,” says the DNC staffer. “I’ve heard that they ended up with the Kerry campaign, for them to decide to how to proceed, and presumably they were handed over to 60 Minutes, which used them the other night. But I know this much. When there was discussion here, there were doubts raised about their authenticity.”

The concerns arose from the sourcing. “It wasn’t clear that our source for the documents would have had access to them. Our person couldn’t confirm from what file, from what original source they came from.”

The documents that CBS News used were not documents from any of Bush’s personnel files from his time in the National Guard. Rather, CBS News stated that they were documents uncovered in the personnel files of Killian. That would explain why the White House or the Pentagon had never before released or even seen them.

According to a Kerry campaign source, there was little gossip about the supposedly hot documents inside the office of the campaign on McPherson Square. “Those documents were not something anyone was talking about or trying to generate buzz on,” says the staffer. “It wasn’t like there were small groups of people talking about this as a bombshell. I think people here weren’t sure what to make of it, because provenance of these documents was uncertain.”
A CBS producer, who initially tipped off The Prowler about the 60 Minutes story, says that despite seeking professional assurances that the documents were legitimate, there was uncertainty even among the group of producers and researchers working on the story.
“The problem was we had one set of documents from Bush’s file that had Killian calling Bush ‘an exceptionally fine young officer and pilot.’ And someone who Killian said ‘performed in an outstanding manner.’ Then you have these new documents and the tone and content are so different.”

The CBS producer said that some alarms bells went off last week when the signatures and initials of Killian on the documents in hand did not match up with other documents available on the public record, but producers chose to move ahead with the story. “This was too hot not to push. If there were doubts, those people didn’t show it,” says the producer, who works on a rival CBS News program.

Now, the producer says, there is growing concern inside the building on 57th Street that they may have been suckered by the Kerry campaign. “There is a school of thought here that the Kerry people dumped this in our laps, figuring we’d do the heavy lifting on the story. That maybe they had doubts about these documents but hoped we’d get more information,” says the producer. “If that’s the case, then we’re bigger fools than we already appear to be judging by all the chatter about how these documents could be forgeries.”

ABC News’ political unit held a conference call at 7:00 p.m. Thursday evening to discuss the memo and its potential ramifications should the documents turn out to be a forgery. That meeting took place around the time that the deceased Killian’s son made public statements questioning the documents’ authenticity.

According to one ABC News employee, some reporters believe that the Kerry campaign as well as the DNC were parties in duping CBS, but a smaller segment believe that both the DNC and the Kerry campaign were duped by Karl Rove, who would have engineered the flap to embarrass the opposition.

Original article here, but all you're likely to get at this point is an error message.

His venomous attacks on Bush seem to be working, at least a little, as the race returns to a statistical dead heat in the latest Fox poll.

Full breakdown of the poll (Adobe Acrobat Reader required).

What interests me is that 2 percent of the respondents had never heard of Dick Cheney, and 5 percent hadn't heard of John Edwards.

Should people who don't know who the candidates are even be allowed to vote?

UPDATE: Then again... (WaPo registration required)

If James Carville says so, it must be true!

Via La Shawn Barber's Corner.

I notice today that I have moved from Slithering Reptile to Adorable Little Rodent in The Truth Laid Bear Ecosystem. In doing so, I have jumped right over "Flappy Birds."

I feel a wholly unjustified sense of accomplishment.

On the first IBM-compatible PC I ever got -- a Tandy 1000EX from Radio Shack -- I used to play the first edition of Chessmaster.

Back then, I rarely beat the computer. Not surprising -- there was no scalable difficulty, so the computer was always doing its utmost to defeat me, and rarely blundering. I, on the other hand, was a veritable catalog of blunders. I flatter myself that I'm a wee bit better these days.

But that program had a very special twitch: any time I would start to win a game, it would lock up the computer. It was not, apparently, programmed to lose, so when it saw that I had established an overwhelming superiority of material and position, it would throw the machine equivalent of a temper-tantrum, and I'd have to reboot -- a process almost as time-consuming and laborious on 1985's technology as it is on 2004's.

I managed to get the computer to admit its defeat on about five occasions that I can think of, and only by sneaking up on mate in such a way that it surprised the computer before it could enter Six Year-Old Emulation Mode. (Of course, when it had me on the ropes -- which was nine games out of ten -- the program performed flawlessly from e4 to "Checkmate. Sorry, you lost. Try again!")

Of course, it didn't really matter if the computer electronically threw the board against the wall, because there was no record kept of victories. No points were awarded, no ratings or rankings parceled out. When I beat the computer, I knew it, and that was all that mattered.

But now I have Chessmaster 10th Edition. And if I thought the program had, in the intervening two decades, matured to the point where it could accept losses, I was wrong.

Last night, as I played against the personality "Lisa," a Young Democrat with a 1006 rating (against my 800-something), it became painfully clear that I was going to win. And not only win, but WIN. "Lisa" had squandered an early advantage with a couple of horrible moves that I had ruthlessly exploited (as we Republicans are wont) to gain an insuperable material and positional advantage and pull within a move or two of mate...

...whereupon Chessmaster threw a fit and locked up.

Back in the day, I wouldn't have minded, because I would've known I'd won, whether the computer admitted it or not. But Tenth Edition keeps track of victories and defeats, and awards points, and it denied me my points!

I guess it was getting back at me for the times I've shut it down when it was about to win.

So, tonight, the rematch. I'm confident. I've beaten her before, I'll beat her again... and then, it's "Josh Waitzkin" at eight years old.

I'm not nearly so confident about that one.

We're starting clubs here at my school. All teachers must either sponsor a club or monitor a study hall. Since I have no particular desire to babysit a bunch of lazy, anti-social non-joiners, I elected to sponsor a club.

The nice thing was that we got make our own clubs.

So I've been able to do something I've wanted to do since I got into teaching: I'm sponsoring a chess club.

I have good memories of chess club when I was in high school. Of all the clubs I ever belonged to, chess club was the least structured, and therefore the most fun. We'd simply gather once a month and play chess for an hour or so -- back in those days, I gave as good as I got, but I was nowhere near as good a player then as I am now (more on this in a moment). No pressure, no muss, no fuss... I don't think we even had officers.

Last year, the remedial math teacher -- an Army intelligence officer with a degree in physics and a truly frightening analytical skillset, including cryptography, image analysis, and a penchant for languages -- held a chess tournament in his classes. His rationale: chess teaches mathematical skill. I dunno... I played quite a bit of chess in high school, but you'd never know it from my pre-calculus grades. But the kids responded enthusiastically (if not particularly skillfully) and thus the seed was planted in my mind for a club.

Once the club idea was approved, I got to work polishing my horribly rusted chess skills. I went out and bought a copy of Chessmaster 10 Edition, which had received high marks from PC Gamer as an instructional program. I played through the game's main instructional tool, "Josh Waitzkin's Chess Academy," in which the subject of the movie Searching for Bobby Fischer teaches the basics of the game: openings, tactics, strategies, endgames. And then I started playing against the program's dozens of "personalities," simulated opponents of all ages and skill levels, rated from 1 to 2475. I lost a few. Then I started winning. I can now consistently defeat players in the 800-1,000 rating range (on the game, anyway).

All this because there is no way I wanted to show up for chess club only to be challenged and trounced by some half-literate sixth-grader.

Our first meeting will be September 23rd, barring anymore hurricanes. Should be fun.

If the Democratic Party were still like Zell Miller, I'd be a Democrat.

If Zell were running for President, against practically anybody the Republicans could put up, I'd have a hard time deciding.

If he runs for reelection, I'll probably vote for him.

"Armed with what? Spitballs?!"

When it was over, I actually yelled "NO! IT CAN'T BE OVER!"

Which, because I was alone in my apartment, was just sad.

I have a sore throat and a low-grade fever. Hard to talk in anything above a soft whisper.

Looks like the kids get to work on their restaurant menus. Or maybe watch a geography video.

(I wrote this originally in the comments section at World Magazine Blog, where there was a thread about the seemingly disparate treatments of the Republican and Democratic National Conventions.)

The major networks' coverage of the DNC went something like this:

Mon.: 10-11pm
Tues: No coverage
Wed: 10-11pm
Thurs: 10-11pm

Major network coverage of the RNC so far:
Mon: No coverage
Tues: 10-11pm

It's too early to be casting stones.

Something to think about, though:

The major networks' coverage of the DNC showed the DNC's best speakers -- Clinton, etc. I was impressed by every speech from the DNC... except Kerry's. At the same time, the DNC's extremists, like Ted Kennedy, were shuffled to Tuesday night, when there was no coverage.

On Monday night at the RNC, there were two powerful speeches from McCain and Giuliani, who reminded everyone of Bush's main strength: his leadership in the GWOT. McCain also made a simple but eloquent defense of the Iraq war which, in my opinion, should have been heard by far more people than actually did hear it. And everyone was raving about Giuliani's speech...

... but it was the night of no coverage from the majors.

Night two, the first night of major coverage: two lackluster speeches (I didn't find Arnold's that good, and Laura loves her husband... big surprise there) (well, considering who was in the Oval Office before, it is a welcome change) and two teen-aged girls who make Paris Hilton look articulate, cogent, and serious...

Of course, there's no conspiracy. But it makes me go "hmmm."