Love blooms in the oddest places sometimes.


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Terry Pluto on the 2007 Tribe.

A profile of the pace and direction of the new president of France.  The conclusion:

Sometimes it seems that since Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette there has not been as dominant a pair as Nicolas and his wife Cecilia.

If you look at the numbers in Iraq for the almost concluded month of September, you’ll find an encouraging story.  This month saw 61 American casualties.  That’s down from 84 a month ago and 126 in May at the surge’s peak.  The breakdown between hostile and non-hostile fatalities is even more encouraging.  There were only 41 American fatalities due to hostile action in September, down from 60 the month before and 123 in May. 

Of course, American military casualties aren’t a necessarily reliable indicator of American military progress.  Throughout 2006, American casualties were low (though generally not as low as they were this past month) while Iraq was going to hell in a hand basket.  For most of ’06, American troops were garrisoned and their commanders devoted most of their attention to force protection, Iraq was falling apart and thousands of Iraqi civilians were dying violent deaths each month.

On both the left and the right, we’ve had a shared philosophical understanding that the best hard number to indicate the state of play in Iraq is the amount of civilian casualties.  In September (so far), 813 Iraqi civilians have died violent deaths.  That’s down from 1674 the month before and roughly 3,000 in what would have been a bad pre-surge month. 

How amazing is this progress?  The lefties at Icasualties.org who truly do yeoman’s work in tallying up these numbers have led their page for the past few days with a link to a CFR report that questions whether David Petraeus has changed the definition of civilian casualties in Iraq and in so doing driven the number of Iraqi civilian casualties down.  The lefties at Icasulaties.org neglect to mention that their numbers don’t come from Petraeus; they gather their numbers from news reports around the world.  If five bodies are found in Baghdad, they go into Icasualties.org’s tally; Petraeus doesn’t get a vote.

I guess you’d expect the left, when addressing Iraq, to resort to such transparently disingenuous subterfuges in order to discount the progress being made.  Actually, that would be Plan B.  Plan A would be to just ignore the good news out of Iraq.  Media outlets that have rushed to commemorate every “grim milestone” out of Iraq the past three years have grown strangely reticent in recent weeks.  If you expected to flip open your edition of the Sunday Times or the Sunday Globe and see a thoughtful piece on what was a very successful September, you were sadly mistaken.  You should also get yourself fitted for a straightjacket. Both papers have nothing to say about Iraq’s big picture this morning, although the Times does offer a helpful piece describing the woes of a long Iraq deployment.  God bless the Grey Lady – she’s always thinking of the troops.

BELIEVE IT OR NOT, the Times and the Globe, for merely ignoring the progress in Iraq, win today’s prize for truthfulness displayed by a mainstream media outlet.  The Washington Post today presents a huge Rick Atkinson spread on our often-losing fight against IED’s .  Like everything else that Atkinson writes, the piece is well worth reading.  While there’s nothing earth shattering in the expos, it is a thoughtful discussion of how our inability to quickly adapt to changing battlefield conditions was our pre-surge Achilles’ heel. 

Nevertheless, the Post’s timing is ridiculous.  Presenting this enormous piece without acknowledging in any way, shape or form the progress that we’ve recently made is absurd.  Yes, America’s military strategy before the Senate (in all its sagacity) unanimously confirmed David Petraeus to lead a different kind of war left a lot to be desired.  But one can only wonder why the Post is choosing today to look back in anger, while ignoring the remarkable numbers out of Iraq.

But it is the L.A. Times that snares the award for “Unmitigated Chutzpah from a Once-reputable Newspaper.”  The L.A. Times runs a front page story today with the headline, “Petraeus Admits to Rise in Iraq Violence.”  Let’s put aside the tendentious headline which suggests, ala Moveon.org, that Petraeus would naturally incline to cook the books and thus any statement he makes about Baghdad that makes it sound like anything less than a little slice of heaven had to therefore be flogged out of him by our watchdog media. You’re still probably wondering, “What in God’s name is the L.A. Times talking about?  The September numbers declined.  A lot”

Here’s how the Times puts it:

BAGHDAD -- Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, acknowledged today that violence had increased since Sunni Arab militants declared an offensive during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.

"Certainly Al Qaeda has had its Ramadan surge," Petraeus said in his first comments to reporters since he returned from Washington to give lawmakers a status report on the war in Iraq. But he said the level of attacks was "substantially lower" than during the same period last year…At least 11 Iraqis were killed in bomb blasts, mortar and gunfire today.

Notice the scare quotes around “substantially lower”.  Also notice that the Times makes no effort to quantify what substantially lower means.  In case you’re more curious than the typical L.A. Times reporter or editor, here’s what “substantially lower than during the same period last year” means:  In September of ’06, there were 3,539 Iraqi civilian and security forces casualties. In September of ’07, there were 813. 

Additionally, and this may be just my fertile imagination running away with me, the tendentious headline combined with the scare quotes seem to imply that General Petraeus’ isn’t altogether trustworthy.  All the more wonder then that the Times didn’t do the simple legwork to verify or debunk his numbers. Perhaps the editors were too busy hatching plans to disingenuously minimize the progress in Iraq to have a spare minute to punch up Icasualties.org on their computers.

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More on the fence.

My Townhall column this week is about Alaska Governor (and possible GOP vice presidential candidate?) Sarah Palin, slayer of the Bridge to Nowhere. Check it out here.

Lost in Mahmoud week and the rush to SCHP, a new embarrassing low was held in in the Dirksen Building as Robert Byrd convened the Senate Appropriations Committee looking into the supplemental funding request by Defense Secretary Robert Gates. 

Joining Gates on the panel was John Negroponte, outgoing Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Peter Pace, and about two dozen Code Pink nutters, who couldn't, it seems, miss this for the world.  If there's one thing you have to give them credit for, it's attendance.  The Code Pink gals have shown up at more government public meetings as well as think tank meetings than most politicians over the last few months.  In fact, the only place they weren't was at Columbia University this week.  If only these ladies dogged the Iranian terrorist-in-chief, chanting for him to get out of Iraq, as fervently as they do to U.S. officials and realist pundits on the war, they actually might have served a useful purpose in reducing the propaganda gains Ahmadinejad made while in America this week.

Back to Robert Byrd, the long of tooth Senator from West Virginia.  His opening remarks of the hearing were spent on theatrics about the costs of the war in Iraq. When he asked rhetorical questions, the Code Pink gals stepped in as the Greek chorus.

But then, things got out of hand. The Code Pink gals couldn't contain themselves to merely being backup singers to the Robert Byrd band, and got removed from the chambers. 

That's my assessment based on his pledge scheme. Follow me for a minute.

On Hannity last night, Newt said he would collect pledges over the Internet. That means he's almost certain to reach the $30 million goal he's set for himself. Whether he can actually raise that amount is another matter entirely.

If I'm a person of modest means but I want Newt to run, I can "pledge" to max out at $2,300. Heck, I can even throw in the wife to up it 46 Benjamins. That doesn't mean I will actually give that much.

Newt would need only 14,000 of his fans to flood the site with $2,300 "pledges" in order to declare a broad public groundswell for his candidacy.

Sound far-fetched? You've seen what Ron Paul supporters do. You think Newt fans wouldn't do the same if they believed his entry into the race depended on it? And if Newt's people actually left the system this open -- i.e. didn't require you to leave a credit card that could then be charged -- I guarantee this hack would spread like wildfire on the blogs the minute the site went up.

Newt is either totally naive (highly unlikely) or knows exactly how the Internet game is played. This deal is rigged.

Paul Campos is a professor of law at the University of Colorado.  You can sense his keen legal mind at work in this Rocky Mountain News opinion piece where he beclowns himself attacking Bill Kristol:

But how respectable is Kristol, really? Anyone who pays the least attention to him soon discovers that the ruling passion of Kristol's life is to involve the United States in as many wars as possible, with as many enemies as he can find or create.

In short, Kristol thinks about war in much the same way the narrator of Lolita thought about 12-year-old girls: with a constant, obsessive, perverse longing.

I choose this analogy with some care(!)… For my part, I'd rather give the Porn King the Presidential Medal of Freedom than shake Bill Kristol's hand.

Try not to be thrown the by the Porn King reference.  Professor Campos spent literally the entire first half of his story writing about a local character known as the Porn King, all to set up that final line of how unrespectable Bill Kristol is.  Good Lord – in addition to thinking sloppily and lazily, the professor can’t write!

Why am I linking to this?  Because it is an excellent thing when the American left reveals itself.  Paul Campos, in spite of his years of academic training, can’t even begin to grapple with the idea that men of good will can disagree on things.  For Campos, the world apparently separates into two camps – fellow travelers and Porn Kings. Why do I somehow suspect that when he sits in the faculty lounge, Campos often lashes out at President Bush’s Manichean worldview?

I humbly suggest that Moveon.org put Professor Campos in charge of all future print advertisements.

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A few points that I hope can wrap things up in a nice neat bow:

1) The only reason Fred Kagan's ideas were able to get any traction at all is because we have a president with an (R) after his name. Don't look for Hillary and Bill to be leafing through the pages of the Standard for their ideas. And absent some blockbuster idea entering the picture in the next 13 months, who sits in the Big Chair has just as much to do with the tactical nitty-gritty in closely divided America as anything else.

Taking this a step further, the only reason we are having debates about surrender is that we have a Speaker of the House with a (D) after her name. If our team controlled the House by just one vote, none of these resolutions would ever come to a vote. And if we have a President with a (D) after her name, they will have everything they need to set in motion a slow-bleed surrender. No amount of pontificating will be able to stop them then.

So, elections matter. And who runs in those elections matter. And the composition of our front bench matters, and is something the blogosphere can impact in terms of making sure the corruptocrats don't go anywhere at the county committee level on up. To do that we must intervene at the local level.

2) Ideas must be at the core of this. If the rightroots ever reaches the prominence of the netroots, I hope we won't repeat the mistake and we'll still be about ideas. A number of us have been discussing what these new ideas might be. Something has become corrupted about a movement and a party that would trade away its best idea -- personalizing Social Security -- for electoral advantage, only to lose the election anyway because we didn't stand for anything. The blogosphere can be on the leading edge of change in developing the next Contract with America, but that will require us to think like activists looking to move the ball down field, not like casual observers of politics.

3) I haven't been bashful about admitting that Jim Ogonowski is not a perfect conservative. He's against withdrawal, but that's basically it. But that hasn't stopped our readership from grasping the singular importance of snatching a Democratic seat in the People's Republic of Massachusetts. It crystallizes an emerging trend (Congress's 11% approval) into an electoral data point the national media can understand, in the same way that the OH-2 special did in 2005.

Yesterday, I posted about Eric Egland in CA-4 (disclosure), who would move his district to the right on ethics and earmarks. The only thing he has in common politically with Ogonowski is this: he would move Washington in a better direction, and away from the left. For conservatives, that should be the test. Naturally, the answers we'll get will look radically different from district to district. 

I was going to post this in the Comments, but I decided it deserved its own mini-post.  Commenter “Joe” (I think it’s my favorite Joe, but there are many Joes here on Townhall) wrote:

Yes the conservative blogosphere has had some victories with the Pajamahadeen and Rathergate and a couple of other big hits. Blogs certainly acted as icebergs to the Kerry campaign (in fueling the Swift Boat critics, etc.). But as an influence to those in power. . . it is not there yet but it is growing. As to influencing the GOP, that still goes to NRO, the Weekly Standard, and syndicated journalist pundits like Krauthammer and Barone (and the Dems still look to their traditional magazine, MSM, and newspaper supporters). But blogs have their place and are growing, they are just not there yet. Ttalk radio folks like Limbaugh, Medved, Ingraham, etc. do more than probably all the conservative blogs combined. Yes influence matters, but traffic is a decent metric for how effective you are in getting that information out.

Blogs aren’t as influential as the people Joe lists because, on the whole, they’re not as good.  Besides, most bloggers don’t even try.  (I fall into the I-try-but-I’m-still-no Krauthammer division.) If you’re going to limit yourself to 60 word posts that instantaneously respond to whatever the talk of the hour is, the odds of you saying something that is going to be influential or that will have a shelf life longer than the subject of the hour are infinitesimal.

The blogs and bloggers who have had a greater impact have had higher ambitions.  What Scott Johnson does is markedly different from what Andrew Sullivan does.  That’s why Scott Johnson took down a network anchor and shaped the conversation on the Ahmadenijad visit, while Andrew prattled endlessly about circumcision.

But Joe’s wrong about traffic.  Andrew has a bigger audience than Scott, but my Cairn Terrier’s non-stop yapping is more likely to influence the national debate than anything Andrew’s modem belches out. Andrew gave up being serious ages ago.

Besides, all of the top tier, second tier and third tier bloggers have large enough audiences that they can influence the debate if they say something that on its merits should influence the debate.  Actually, they already do influence the debate.  I know for a fact that a lot of important and influential people hang on every word that the Allahpundit writes.  Same for Ace.  (Who says conservatives don’t have a sense of humor?)

Their prominence has nothing to do with the size of their audience, and everything to do with the fact that people consider them unusually insightful guys. Both Ace and Allah have influenced people, and have managed to do so without issuing a single action alert.

As regards talk radio, of course it’s more influential than the blogosphere.  Rush Limbaugh has something like 15 million listeners.  The conservative blogosphere has something like 200,000 readers.  Tops.  The liberal blogosphere isn’t much bigger.  I’ll skip you the boring lecture on “unique visits” and why Daily Kos’ numbers are so much bigger than everyone else’s.  Just take my word for it – Kos doesn’t have much more than 200,00 readers, if any more than that.

One thing Rush understands is that unless he turns out an entertaining product, he won’t have 15 million listeners.  He’d be lucky to have 15. If Rush turned out a dreadful product, he would probably no longer be on the air.  If his bread and butter was action alerts, there would be a lot fewer Ditto-Heads.

As far as bloggers being influential is concerned, here’s what I learned while I was toiling away in obscurity on Soxblog:  I was able to write stuff that Hugh Hewitt would sometimes share with two million Americans.  That was a lot more readers than I had.  Or that any blogger had. Or has.

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When my trusty Vaio died last week, I thought that a challenge would be useful and that for the first time ever, I'd try out a Mac. Now I am on the road with a new MacBook, struggling to figure out Apple 101. Foolish me to think that if the iPod could be so brilliantly simple, so too would be the MacBook.

Patrick definitely tagged me.  Allow me to offer just a couple of things of a factual nature by way of response.  Other than that, I’ll let the posts stand as they are:

1)      Patrick is right that I simplified Fred Kagan’s background.  His standing as a super-qualified expert, though, only further makes my point.  Kagan wrote about the surge for the Weekly Standard, a magazine with fewer readers than the Daily Kos.  And yet it moved the debate, and altered the political scene more profoundly than any opinion piece of the decade.  In other words, nothing has the potency of a powerful idea.  The blogosphere’s potential to produce ideas is the real gold in them thar virtual hills.

2)      Going just by the numbers, Patrick overstates the potential potency of blogospheric fund-raising.  Patrick writes, “But don't underestimate the millions -- yes millions -- of activists who will be inspired to give money next year.”  Something may inspire these millions – yes millions – but it won’t be reading blogs.  Check out our sitemeters.  The most popular center/right blog doesn’t even approach having one million readers (or even a half million readers), let alone additional millions of readers. 

3)      Sorry – I’m going to sneak in a more theoretical point.  In regards to the relative online success of raising money for Colonel Jim Ogonowski who’s running in a congressional special election against Paul Tsongas’ tediously liberal widow, Patrick writes, “It's all about knowing what buttons to push and picking the right battles. “ 

While the button to contribute to his campaign has become ubiquitous on this site, I haven’t seen any commentary on why electing Ogonowski is “the right battle”.  I had Colonel Ogonowski on the radio last Sunday, and he’s the kind of conservative who talks about what a big mistake it was to invade Iraq and how we have to get the troops home.  He spends the rest of his time lamenting the partisan divide in Washington.  Obviously, to win in greater Boston, he has to say rubbish like this, and he would certainly have my vote.  He also seems like a great guy.

But will he be the kind of congressman who will forward the agenda of the right-roots?  Is he the kind of Republican that conservatives who don’t have to breathe the fetid air of Cambridge should be excited about? Or is the right-roots’ lodestar merely electing people who aren’t Democrats?  If so, that sounds a lot like Kos’s philosophy. 

You might want to check with Markos to see how his political tactics have translated into real world change.  Hint: Markos’ tactics have been outflanked by Fred Kagan’s ideas.

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What, you didn't think I would stay out of this, did you? As tiresome, grating Action Alert Guy, how could I?

I get that online activism is not the kind of thing that'll get everyone's skirt up. But taken to its logical conclusion, the view that "it's all about punditry" is just as short sighted as Kos's whining, thought-free winnerism.

Dean's right that it is about ideas. Ideas are the foundation of everything we do in politics -- the door knocking, the envelope stuffing, the donating. But punditry is increasingly divorced from actual ideas.

How many blog posts do you see with a bright new idea for dealing with Iran, or solving Social Security? Such posts are few and far between because the people who have time to think them up are few and far between. So instead, what we mostly have is clever, witty commentary on the history others are busy making. If that's what punditry is, count me out. There are probably thousands of other bloggers who could turn a phrase better than I can on the Petraeus Report. It's just not my thing. I don't want to spend my time being the 6,297th voice in a giant echo chamber.

That's what 99% of punditing has become -- but it's the other 1% that really interests me.

Take a look at Dean's example of the supremacy of punditry. It was an intellectual at AEI who first proposed the surge. Stop right there. That's as far away from the pundits bloviating on the Sunday Shows as you can get. Frederick Kagan wasn't regurgitating second-hand information. He was proposing an original idea, one powerful enough to get  picked up on by the White House.

In my book, pushing an idea from concept to execution is not punditry. It is activism. In another realm, doesn't the term "judicial activism" connote the idea that one need not look up from a law book or leave chambers to be an activist?

You do not need to give money or trudge through Iowa to be an activist. All you have to do is propose an original idea and own it like a dog with a bone. You can do that that through writing alone if the idea is important enough.

I try to only blog when I have something original to say, whether it looks outwardly like I'm being a "pundit" or an "activist." The state-of-the-movement discussion we were having this summer is a perfect example. That conversation was not an act of punditry, but of activism, and of trying to generate the intellectual capital necessary to move the party in the right direction in time for 2008. It was commentary not for its own sake, but to achieve certain definable objectives.

Even in my ideal world, blogs will do commentary the vast majority of the time. What concerns me is that we don't always properly appreciate the implications of what that writing can accomplish. Do you understand what TPM Muckraker did with its team of reporters to seed the narrative of a corrupt GOP in the last election? Or (as Jon Henke can sing chapter and verse on) what they did in conjunction with that famous New Republic piece to create a narrative of George Allen as racially insensitive, without which "macaca" may never have taken hold? Poring through FEC reports and doing original reporting is something we simply don't do enough of. Call it boring activism if you must, but looking at  the Left's dominance of original reporting, the Internet creates an opportunity for conservatives to level the playing field.

And what about straight activism? Is Dean actually implying someone should never bother to contribute under $100 to a campaign (psst... at the evil, top-down RNC, where I used to work, that's where we got most of our money)? Or that one shouldn't bother to volunteer? Yes -- a few exceptional bloggers will always have the greatest impact with their words, particularly when they can inject new ideas rather than rehash the day's news. But what about busy readers who don't have time to blog themselves? Can't they make their impact by making a quick donation or calling their Congressman?

The bottom line is this. I'm concerned about the message we're broadcasting to everyone in our movement when we suggest that activism is somehow unworthy of us. The Goldwater-Reagan Revolution would not have been possible with that mentality. Some have the luxury of being pundits exclusively, but most people will make their impact through activism of one form or another.

In cases like MA-5, the contrast is even more pronounced. All the commentary in the world will not elect someone like Jim Ogonowski, because no matter compelling the words are, fewer than 1 in 435 readers will be in a position to act on the message with their votes. But contributions, on the other hand, are convertible into hard assets that matter in the district. And by creating a narrative about why this race matters, we can exercise a disproportionate impact on a race that could have a disproportionate impact in damaging the Democrat-controlled Congress. I'm hopeful that we did more than just raise $15,000. By creating enough of a buzz, who's to say we didn't signal some big donors to jump in too? Only 7 new maxed-out donors and we've doubled our money. It's all about knowing what buttons to push and picking the right battles.

At the Presidential level, things are actually worse than Dean imagines. Yes, the blogosphere is spread too thin to be able to make much difference activism-wise at the Presidential level. The blogosphere actually had relatively little to do with Howard Dean, or Jim Webb, or Barack Obama, or (arguably) with Ron Paul. Heroic efforts like MyManMitt's still remain the exception.

But don't underestimate the millions -- yes millions -- of activists who will be inspired to give money next year. And the fact that Democrats have figured out how to create a huge markets for online fundraising and actually raise anywhere from a third to half of their money through the medium should scare us. This is about more than Kos -- he can only move coin in the low seven figures. I'm talking about the eight and possibly nine figures that the broader Democrat activist space can produce because their leaders have been strategic in fully embracing the medium and doing the important things online.

The bottom line is that now is not the time to be risk averse. Now is not to be time to circumscribe activism. Not with the country at risk of complete Democrat control.

Tim Weiner's impressive and compelling new history of the CIA, Legacy of Ashes, has stirred up a lot of resentment among intelligence community veterans.

"Tim’s an old friend of mine, but I don’t think the book is a terrific history of the CIA," said Dr. Mark Lowenthal, a former senior official of the CIA, on my show yesterday.   He continued:

Basically, they never do anything right [in the book].  And even when something goes right, Tim has a way of denigrating it. There’s also an awful lot of factual errors in the book that I find disturbing. Not major things, but enough to begin to make you wonder. I just don’t find it a terribly reliable take on how the CIA’s done over the years. 

 

(The transcript is here.) Other efforts at push-back are showing up as well, as in this David Ignatius column extolling two Agency forecasts of trouble ahead in Iraq from early 2003.

By contrast, David Wise's Washington Post review concluded that "Weiner's study is based on a prodigious amount of research into thousands of documents that have been declassified or otherwise uncovered, as well as oral histories and interviews,"  and concludes that it "succeeds as both journalism and history, and it is must reading for anyone interested in the CIA or American intelligence since World War II."

I interview Weiner for two hours today, and after you listen to him, and especially after you read the book, you'll understand why Agency people have the long knives out for Weiner's work.

Read the Transcript of the Weiner interview here.