Saturday, January 31, 2004

Another shot at a strawman. David Appell voted in New Hampshire for Howard Dean. "I didn't vote for Howard Dean because he has a blog or because he used MeetUp.com or because his supporters were somehow more wired than anyone else. For crying out loud." For crying out loud, indeed. Who ever said, thought, or believed that online campaigning is supposed to attract voters simply because it's done online? It's about making campaigns more effective, not making a campaign issue of being able to use a computer. 2:00:06 PM    comment []

The big lie about "weapons of mass destruction" wasn't the Bush administration's insistence that Iraq had banned weapons -- a widely-held belief, albeit one pimped and politicized by hawks. The big lie is in the term itself. Rafe Colburn nailed it in June: The initial bait for getting people to discuss going to war with Iraq was nuclear weapons. The fear was that Iraq would go nuclear, supply nuclear material to terrorists, and the next thing you know, we'd have a smoking hole where a US city once was. As it became obvious that Iraq's nuclear capabilities weren't what they were purported to be, suddenly chemical and biological weapons came into the picture, and all three types of weapon were lumped together in the "weapons of mass destruction" category. Scam. Now Josh Marshall applies that meme to David Kay's rhetoric to help "outline the ridiculousness of Kay’s judgment." (T)he catch-all phrase ‘weapons of mass destruction’ obscures much more than it clarifies. It groups together things like mustard gas, which is really battlefield weapon, with nuclear weapons, which really are weapons of mass destruction. The White House was well aware of this. And for that reason it repeatedly pressed the argument that Iraq was close to creating nuclear warheads --- a point over which there was very real disagreement within the Intelligence Community. 9:54:28 AM    comment []

Halley: Levitra letdown. 9:34:32 AM    comment []

A cool network map of book-buying patterns yields this insight to Valdis Krebs: "(P)olitical books are preaching to the converted...if you are working a 2004 political campaign what do you do with this information?... All you can do is focus on the edge nodes and the bridges." 9:31:04 AM    comment []