Today is the deadline for the guess-the-election contest run by longtime Benzene friend BRUX. For the second election in a row, I have managed to botch my intent to participate. In 2000, I lost track of time and forgot to get my ballot in by the deadline. This time I was watching more carefully -- and indeed I've been emailing Brux a lot with gossipy poll-watching -- but I foolishly mailed him a check not noticing that the contest rules require cash. Now it's too late to play.

One reason that's a shame is because this contest is actually a good deal for me financially. Brux's rules are that you submit a dollar for every entry. An entry consists of predicting the winner for each state in the presidential election. The person who guesses the most electoral votes correctly wins the entire pot. Simple. Even if it were a pure lottery that would be a fair bet, since Brux isn't skimming anything off the top. If your guess is better than the average participant's, your average expected earnings ratio is positive.

Mind you, I don't think I'm some sort of seer who knows enough to guess all the states right. I do think that half the players in Brux's pool are just doing it on a lark and aren't really paying careful attention. Therefore, I'm really competing with the other half, who are watching all the same polls I am. Against them, it's pretty much a random shot, but since the pot includes the dollars from the others as well, the pot odds are good. I figure I have something like a 1-in-50 shot to win 100-to-1 payout on my money.

But alas, I'm not actually in the game. Owing to the dollar snafu, I can't officially participate, but I'll put my guesses on record here anyway.

The rules allow you to submit as many entries as you like. I decided several weeks ago that I was going too send in two entries (two dollars) -- one for a close race, and one for a race that breaks slightly toward Kerry -- and I'm sticking with that plan. Like most poll-watchers, my general opinion is that it is in fact a close race, but owing to the uncertainty of polls (more uncertain than usual in this high-intensity, high-turnout race) it might break either way. On top of that, my vague personal sense is that the chance of a break toward Kerry is slightly underestimated, hence the decision to make my two guesses accordingly. A slight break toward Bush is also possible, but I'm choosing not to play that bet.

The other thing that characterizes my guesses here is that I think the Great Lakes area is slightly more conservative than is generally perceived, and the Southwest is slightly more liberal than is generally perceived. Specifically, that means I think IA and WI lean more toward Bush than they're often given credit for, and similarly MN and MI are more vulnerable for Kerry. On the other hand, I think NV, AZ and CO are less safe for Bush than generally thought. Basically, this notion of mine is based on the idea that the cultural demographic is moving in those directions and the general perception and polling give undue weight to recent history.

All of that is just a subtle nudge on top of the conventional wisdom, though. For the most part, my guesses are nothing radical. They're pretty much in line with the overall polling data. I only add my personal interpretation on top for some marginal cases. (Probably there is one particular poll that matches my particular bias, but I'm not sure which one.)

First, the obvious calls:

Bush: AL, AK, AZ, AR, GA, ID, IN, KS, KY, LA, MS, MT, NE, NC, ND, OK, SC, SD, TN, TX, UT, VA, WY.

Kerry: CA, CT, DE, DC, HI, IL, MD, MA, NJ, NY, RI, VT, WA.

When I say "obvious", I mean that if I were put all these states in a single list and only say I'm making the obvious call for each of them, anyone who is paying attention to the race will immediately know which candidate I mean for each. That's not quite the same as saying they're all automatic. Arkansas is not considered a "swing state" but it's not so far out of reach for Kerry. On the other side, New Jersey and Washington are basically blue states, but not entirely safe. Even Hawaii, traditionally one of the bluest of the blues, is much closer this year. Virginia and North Carolina, on the other hand, are steadily becoming less Republican, though I don't think they're ready to break yet.

Guess #1 (close race)

Bush: CO, IA, MO, NV, OH, WV, WI. Total = 264.

Kerry: FL, ME, MI, MN, NH, NM, OR, PA. Total = 274.

Guess #2 (slight push toward Kerry)

Bush: CO, MO. Total = 217

Kerry: FL, IA, ME, MI, MN, NV, NH, NM, OH, OR, PA, WV, WI. Total = 321

Comments: With regard to the close race scenario, my procedure all along has been to look at this state by state without any preconceived notion of the overall winner, and for most of my watch period that has yielded a win for Bush. For most of the past month I've been inclining toward Bush winning FL and Kerry winning OH, and it was only today that I finally decided to swap them both.

Once I made that switch, I notice with interest how easy it is for the electoral vote totals to come out in a tie (in which case Bush wins, because Republicans control the House). Starting from my guess #1, all it takes is to move NM to the other side to make it 269-269.

In this scenario, I think MN, MI, and PA are all closer than commonly perceived. If I were doing a lean-Bush scenario, I'd move all three of them (along with FL and NM for sure, maybe a few more), but I'm not. Of the others NM and WV are close calls, but I'm comfortable with where I've got them. The rest are pretty easy.

Brux's rules don't allow for having Bush win one of Maine's four electoral votes, which is a definite possibility. Maine assigns it's electoral votes by congressional district, with the majority vote in each district getting an elector and the two extra electors following the statewide vote. The southern half of the state is safely Democratic. The northern half is a swing district, with that one vote able to go either way. I honestly don't know which way I'd guess it in this scenario, but since Brux's rules don't allow for it, I didn't have to decide.

One other comment about this scenario. If by luck I've guessed them all correctly, this almost certainly means Bush has won the nationwide popular vote, providing an interesting reversal of the 2000 situation.

In the second scenario, the only thing I've done that's daring is give Kerry NV. That's sort of my personal touch to set my guess apart from the pack, I suppose. For the rest, it's very simple. Every swing state goes to Kerry and the rest go as they are "supposed" to. Note that I'm refusing to consider MO a true swing state here, even though that's arguable. So I guess that's my second personal touch.

Well, this is interesting. Literally within minutes of posting that I got an email from BRUX, which renders much of what I just wrote obsolete. I was tempted to take it down and start over, but instead I'll just add this update.

The first bit of news is that the two dollars which I was sure would not make it in time for the deadline did arrive, so I'm in the contest after all. However, the deadline for guesses is today at noon, and it's past noon, so the revised guesses listed above don't count. Instead, my official guesses for the contest will be a preliminary entry I emailed Brux about a week ago.

No need to rehash the logic behind them; it's the same except one week out of date. Here then are the guesses I'm on record for in the contest:

Entry #1 (close race)

Bush: CO, FL, IA, MO, NV, OH, WV, WI. Total = 292.

Kerry: ME*, MI, MN, NH, NM, OR, PA. Total = 246.

This is identical to the Guess #1 above with the very large exception that I've given Florida to Bush here. (It's enough to change who wins the election.)

* Also, in that email to Brux I did specify that one of Maine's four electoral votes would go to Bush, but if I'm understanding Brux's rules correctly, he still counts that as a pick of Maine for Kerry. The totals listed above assume the 3/1 split of Maine's votes.

Entry #2 (slight push toward Kerry)

Bush: CO, MO, NV, WV. Total = 227.

Kerry: FL, IA, ME, MI, MN, NH, NM, OH, OR, PA, WI. Total = 311.

This is the same as Guess #2 above, except that Nevada and West Virginia stay with Bush.

I notice that my totals for this particular scenario exactly match a sentence in today's update on one of the poll-watching blogs, Real Clear Politics, which says, "A strong break towards Kerry and most of these states would flip his direction leading to something like a 311-227 Kerry win." Possibly this alignment of states is exactly what the writer had sketched out.

In terms of the contest, I really don't feel any worse off with these entries than with the ones listed earlier in this post. Within certain parameters, it's a crap shoot anyway, and all of these are within the parameters.

By the way, Brux has been running this contest for a long time. I think the first one was in 1988. One year I came in second place, just one electoral vote behind Brad Wilson. I think that was 1992. Prize for second place is diddly-squat.

2nd Update: Brux writes back to tell me that my 3/1 split for Maine's votes really does count as such for the contest. He also says:

I didn't save records either, but I'm pretty sure I'd remember if I actually won any money. Possibly there was a mention of it somewhere in Benzene 3. In the Brad Wilson showdown, I remember I called Georgia wrong but got every other state right, while Brad got a collection of smaller states wrong but they added up to only 12 votes, while GA was 13. I think it was South Dakota, Delaware, and what? Arkansas? I'm pretty sure about SD, because I remember thinking that was an easy one he shouldn't have missed.

6:37:14 PM  [permalink]  comment []  

October 15?
Worse Than Watergate: The Secret Presidency of George W. Bush, John W. Dean (2004)

Most of Benzene's book reviews include one or more lengthy digressions on a topic which has little to do with the book being reviewed. This time the digression is at the beginning.

This is probably the closest I'll come to stating my position on the presidential election, so I suppose you can look at this as the blog endorsement. (Uh, it goes for Kerry, eventually.)

My reasons for opposing the re-election of President Bush are rather different from those of most of my fellow Democrats. For starters, I don't care about the many trivial criticisms of Bush -- that he smirks during debates, that he mispronounces the names of foreign leaders, that he may or may not have skipped out of his National Guard duty, and so forth. That ought to go without saying, but given the emphasis of much of the Democratic cheerleading, one wonders.

I see very little reason to prefer either candidate based on foreign policy. I come at this from an unusual angle, in that my own foreign policy views are so out of the mainstream that I can take it as a matter of course that no major candidate will ever represent them. The way I see it, America has for the past several decades pursued an aggressive policy that seeks power over the entire world through projecting military strength. The public justification for this policy varies over the years, and much of it is kept quiet and not justified at all. The real rationale is economic. Exercising political control or influence in nations around the world brings economic benefits to America and especially to those American companies which do business there. In some cases the benefits outweigh the costs, and military imperialism is a good investment, at least economically. More often, the benefits redound disproportionately on certain privileged groups while the costs are borne by the government or the public at large.

America's imperialism based on military power is of debatable morality, but I'm not much for moral debates. My objections are more practical. I believe the policy is bankrupting the nation, is corrupting our democratic process, and if unchecked will bring down our great nation rather like it brought down the Soviet Union. (This is essentially the argument Chalmers Johnson makes in Sorrows of Empire, though I don't agree with him in every detail.)

That being the case, I would like to see an American foreign policy that turns against militarism and imperialism and limits its interventionism only to those cases where the cost-benefit analysis is clearly favorable to the nation as a whole. No serious candidate for the presidency offers this -- not this year, nor any other year since I've been following politics. All the major candidates favor America's traditional interventionism, and that includes Howard Dean, who has been misperceived by both his supporters and his detractors as some sort of pacifist, which he is not. (Dean was, and is, my preferred candidate for reasons unrelated to his foreign policy.)

Opponents of American isolationism, including many of my friends and readers, like to frame this debate in terms of national security. They characterize anti-imperialism as an abdication of the duty to defend America militarily. I think is an absurd argument, not only when applied to a less belligerent internationalist like Kerry or Dean but even when applied to a bona fide isolationist like Pat Buchanan or Dennis Kucinich. There are of course genuine military threats to America, but continuing to defend against them is something so basic that even the fringe-most candidates share in it. No president is going to fail to defend America against an actual attack. Not Buchanan or Kucinich. Not even Michael Badnarik, David Cobb or -- heaven help us -- Ralph Nader. To argue otherwise is to say that these men are so foolish or incompetent that they don't even care to save American lives, a position which I consider insupportable and insulting. I have numerous complaints about Ralph Nader, but a belief that he will twiddle his thumbs while someone launches missiles at our cities is not one of them.

The real difference is not that the fringe isolationist candidates would fail to defend America. The difference is that they will fail to support America's traditional policy of pursuing global hegemony by projecting force around the world. That's just what I want them to do, because I think that very policy is the greater threat to America.

As for the War on Terror, no, I'm not saying we shouldn't continue to fight against the Islamist terrorist threat to America. I'm saying that doing so has little or nothing to do with invading countries like Iraq and Afghanistan. As was commonly discussed a few years ago but is largely ignored now, al-Qaeda is a sort of umbrella organization supporting several smaller terrorist groups which share its general philosophy. The attack on the World Trade Center was plotted by one of these groups, the Egyptian al-Jihad al-Islami. So why didn't we put go after them in Egypt? Why didn't we go after their supporters in Pakistan and in Saudi Arabia? Why did we instead attack two other nations whose connection to the attack were much less? The justification for the invasion of Afghanistan, as far as I can tell, is that al-Qaeda forces had once trained in bases in Afghanistan. OK, but they also trained in bases in Pakistan, and for that matter even in the United States. Why didn't we go after them there? It is also mentioned that the Taliban was an odious regime. OK, but there are odious regimes in Zimbabwe and Myanmar, too. Why haven't we deposed them, too?

This is another discussion for another day. My point is that our aggressive foreign policy in Iraq and Afghanistan --- not to mention the numerous other countries where we have projected military force but are not actively fighting at the moment -- is only peripherally related to actually combatting the terrorist threat against us. It is separable from that effort, and I believe it should be separated.

Naturally, I am well aware that mine is a minority opinion, probably even among readers of Benzene. So be it. I was discussing my reasons for opposing President Bush's reelection. The purpose of this long digression about foreign policy was to illustrate my point of view, from which Kerry and Bush are merely two different breeds of imperialist and thus neither to be preferred over the other on those grounds.

On the immediate question of what to do with Iraq given the situation that we now find ourselves in, the difference between Bush and Kerry is barely perceptible. (Dean, curiously enough, would be more devoted to keeping troops there than either Bush or Kerry, which comes as a surprise to those who listened more to the pundits than to the candidate during the primary. He argued that the war was a mistake largely because it would oblige us to stay engaged there for years to come.)

On the retrospective question of what the president should have done in the past three years, and thus the corollary question of how they might handle future situations, the difference between Kerry and Bush is a bit more noticeable, but still not so much that I strongly prefer one over the other. I do very much dislike Bush's "New American Century" ideology, with its heavy investment in preemptive wars, but I'm no more impressed by Kerry's equally unrealistic wishy-washy internationalism. What small measure of preference I have for Kerry's foreign policy sits alongside various issues of secondary importance for me.

When voting for president, I'm somewhat of a single-issue voter, and that issue for me is fiscal discipline. Theoretically, it's not strictly a matter wanting to rein in the public debt. Ultimately, what I really care about is a wise allocation of public resources toward those things which are genuinely public goods, no allocation at all for those things which are purely private benefits, and restricting borrowing only to those programs which can be fairly justified as investments in the future rather than consumption for the present. (That's the sort of thing that made me like Howard Dean, and Gary Hart before him.)

But that's in an ideal world. In the real political world the tendency toward deficit spending is so strong that arresting that tendency pretty much dwarfs the other fiscal concerns. Kerry's promise to reduce the deficit is not very convincing. The one thing he has going for him is his insistence on abiding by pay-as-you-go rules. (And his early support of similar schemes like Gramm-Rudman in the 1980s suggests that he might really mean it.) Against a normal Republican, a fiscal position like Kerry's might not impress me, but Bush's position is truly awful. He somehow manages to set records simultaneously in reducing revenue and increasing spending.

Some anti-government Republicans have suggested a "starve the beast" strategy whereby using tax cuts to reduce revenues is a good thing because the only way to stop those incorrigibly profligate Democrats from spending more money on Big Government is to cut off the supply of money so that there's nothing left to spend. That was a dubious theory to begin with, but President Bush has surely disproven it for good. The government is out of spending money, the Democrats are out of power in every branch of the government, and yet the Congress is still spending money at as great a pace as ever. If this hasn't "starved the beast", nothing will, short of complete financial collapse, and I don't think that Argentina is the small-government conservative's vision of a rescued economy.

There are other issues that matter to me -- civil liberties, environment, etc. As I continue to contemplate the various things that set the two candidates apart for me, I come to realize that it really comes down to two things, and both are matters not of ideology but of process.

One of these is something I've discussed a bit and have a pretty good grasp of. I'll save myself some effort and crib from a post I made to RMO earlier this month. (There's a bit of repetition on the deficit issue; sorry about that.)

The second -- which I never got to in the RMO post -- is something I'm still trying to wrap my brain around. I've hinted at it in some threads in RMO, and in correspondence with REG, but I still can't quite state exactly what I mean. It has to do with how the Bush administration's culture of secrecy has a negative effect on the efficiency of the democratic process.

What made the United States of America a more successful state than the Soviet Union, both politically and economically? What makes General Electric one of the most successful large corporations in modern times? The key factor is the decentralized structure of decision-making bodies. Neither the people nor the leaders of the Soviet Union wanted their economy to fail, and I don't believe that those leaders were simply stupider than our American ones. The key difference, I think, is that we benefit from a system which is self-correcting. Different individuals or units within the system are able to propose competing ideas. Some will be good ideas and some will be bad, and no central planner will be wise enough to always know which is which. But in our system it's not necessary, because there are mechanism by which the bad ideas get squeezed out as they fail. That is the nature of our (relatively) successful free-market economy, and the same principle applies to our (relatively) democratic system of government.

But the success of this system relies on channels of information and free competition of ideas. It is not necessary for the proponents of a bad idea to recognize their own error and concede to their opponents. What is necessary is that others be able to judge the idea accurately and favor or not favor it accordingly. This is most obviously true for the democratic replacement of unsuccessful political officers, but it applies equally to the internal policymaking debates within a party as well as the long-term ebb and flow of positions between the parties. Any individual proponent within the system benefits if he can control the information and prevent his own dislodgement regardless of the merits of his position. The system as a whole benefits when he lacks that power.

What I am sensing is that the Bush administration is making many small changes in the structure of government which are impeding this flow of information and our government is slowly becoming less effective as a result. This, I think, is the key to the many serious questions of the Bush administration's general competence. It's not that Bush is stupid or that his advisors are stupid -- any more than Khrushchev's agricultural policy failed due to the stupidity of his advisors -- it's that the system is becoming less effective.

The decay did not begin with Bush, but it has accelerated dramatically under his administration. Much of the change, I think, has to do with the Bush administration's culture of secrecy, which is devoted to using information as power. It empowers the individual units within the system, whoever they are, at the cost of the system's self-correcting ability. What makes this dangerous is that it's a systemic problem and not a matter of any particular individuals in power. If all of the Bush bureaucrats are turned out and a new crop of Democratic take their place, unless the structural damage is repaired, the new bureaucrats will be just as ineffective.

As I said, these are vague thoughts and I haven't yet made proper sense of my theory here. I believe the culture of secrecy has a lot to do with it, but it's not all of it. I think it was Ron Suskind's book about Paul O'Neill (The Price of Loyalty) that first got me thinking about secrecy, followed by Daniel Patrick Moynihan's Secrecy which the O'Neill book prominently mentions. I never finished Secrecy, since the part written by Moynihan bogs down in a lot of tedious details about the Cold War which didn't interest me, but the lengthy introduction by Richard Gid Powers was excellent. Since then the idea has been germinating in my head, but not producing anything.

At last, we come to the book I'm supposedly reviewing. Of the eight books I have out from the library (due to the change in the computer system which made all my holds become active at once), Worse Than Watergate was the sixth that I started but the first that I finished. I read it quickly because the first few chapters seemed to promise a discussion of the corrosive effect of secrecy in government.

Alas, it didn't quite live up to the promise. There was very little large-scale discussion of what makes government work. (I'm actually getting more of that from John Kay's Culture and Prosperity, even though it's exclusively about economics and barely discusses politics at all.) Dean does, however, provide a thorough and well-documented list of the Bush administration's abuse of power through withholding information. At times the book resembles the various compilations of "Bush lies", but Dean stays on topic and restricts himself to matters directly related to his theme of government secrecy.

It's a useful compilation. Although many of Dean's revelations are common ones in the list of complaints against Bush, some are less publicized. In the aftermath of Watergate, numerous laws were passed with the purpose of holding the executive branch accountable to the Congress and to the people. The Bush administration is flouting nearly all of them, using a combination of loopholes, creative interpretations of the laws, and in some cases outright defiance of a rule which they've determined is unenforceable.

I don't intend to summarize all of Dean's findings here, but some typical examples:

• As is widely reported, nearly all of the Bush's economic projections turn out to be wildly erroneous. We can't say for sure that these aren't honest mistakes in prediction, but given that the consensus of economists recognizes them as erroneous as soon as they are released, it seems likely that the administration is not even trying to make accurate predictions. Similar patterns are found in other types of information released by departments of the executive branch. These releases are no longer about providing information to Congress and the public; they are about political promotion.

• On the flip side of that certain reports have been squelched. The muzzling of the budget wonk who would have revealed the actual known cost of the President's Medicare proposal is well-known. Less well-known are the White House's attempts to silence various safety-related announcements prepared by the Environmental Protection Agency, a pattern which eventually led to EPA Director Christie Todd Whitman's resignation.

• The Presidential Records Act requires that presidential papers be made public 12 years after the president's term ends. Bush has claimed national security as a reason for withholding substantial portions of Reagan's presidential papers. For good measure he also issued an executive order defining the procedure for making presidential papers available which effectively renders the Presidential Records Act null and void.

• Requests for documents through the Freedom of Information Act are now routinely denied and delayed for as long as the law will allow, and sometimes longer.

• The general authority that any agency has to classify sensitive documents has been taken advantage of to such great extent that in many agencies, classification is the rule rather than the exception. For politically sensitive documents, the White House will sometimes declassify selectively in such a way to make political opponents look bad, while withholding the context that would explain the situation.

What Dean doesn't discuss is the ramifications of a style of governing based on closing channels of information. I believe that it is at the root of nearly all of the "competence" objections leveled against Bush. Framing it in terms of competence is misleading I think. It makes it sound like individuals in the administration are stupid and do a lousy job, but that's not it. Many individuals do a fine job, but it doesn't translate into fine policy.

We've seen several reports now about many in the administration who warned that there would we would face an anti-American insurgency in Iraq after the invasion, that our forces were insufficient to "win the peace", that the intelligence about WMDs was bad, and so forth. If that's the case, why did we make bad decisions nevertheless? I believe it's because the advice never got back to the president to inform his decisions. The White House has as much as said so, but when they say it it's in the way of making excuses for the President so that he's not to blame since no one told him so. But who is to blame for the fact that no one told him so?

Agencies within the government do not talk to each other and they do not talk to themselves. There is plenty of evidence that pieces of information relating to the 9/11 attacks were known to various local agencies and individuals within the government. If this information had been properly funneled, the attacks might have been prevented. Instead, the information was blocked.

Because of the publicity given to the Congressional commission that investigated 9/11, we like to imagine that discussion of this intelligence failure has been thoroughly aired, but it has not. That was a narrowly defined investigation which lacked authority to study the whole system. The CIA's own report, mandated by Congress, was finished in June, but to this day it is still withheld -- not just unreleased to the public, but unreleased even to the Congress which requested it. The release has been blocked for political reasons. The cost is a further reduction in the flow of information.

There is a pattern throughout the administration of no one being held responsible for mistakes. In the last debate, Bush was unable to name a single mistake that his administration has made. The pattern of denying responsibility is so ingrained that he instinctively viewed acknowledgment of any mistake as politically dangerous. It should not be. A successful organization is one which can learn from its mistakes.

The torture of prisoners in Abu Ghraib and elsewhere was clearly a major mistake. Who was held responsible for it? The Economist opined that Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld should have been sacked for it, which is surely what would have happened in the case of a similar fiasco by the British government. It's not a matter of personal punishment. It's not that if something like this happened on Rumsfeld's watch he must be a bastard and therefore we ought to make him pay. It's that negative reinforcement for bad results is essential to the efficiency of the system.

We don't rely on an omniscient central planner to only implement good policies and eschew bad ones. That would not be practical. We do rely on a system of responsibility whereby when someone screws up bad enough, he gets the boot so that someone else can give it a try. That's how our system corrects itself. Under Bush this mechanism has been blocked.

Analysis of corporate management is not something I have experience with, so I'm not very good at this, but it seems to me that all of this is part of a single pattern. The Bush administration has created a culture in which being held politically responsible for anything is not allowed. In order to resist such responsibility, operators at every level have closed down channels of communication which might inform them in any negative way, and this in turn has severely curtailed the effectiveness of the entire bureaucracy to implement wise policy. When an entire department breaks down like this, it should be replaced at the top, which is the logic for expecting Rumsfeld's resignation after Abu Ghraib. When the entire administration breaks down, it is the responsibility of the electorate to replace the president.

As usual, I took notes as I read. (As I read John W. Dean's Worse Than Watergate, I mean. This is a book review, remember?) Without any effort to make a story out of them, here are a few passages that held my attention. From the preface:

I am charmed by Dean's use of the pronoun "we". It would have been so easy to say "they".

About George W. Bush:

This suggests not a Bush who is stupid, the common perception, but one who is sufficiently intelligent that he has been able to get away with being intellectually lazy (something I have some familiarity with...). Note that in the quoted paragraph Dean is contrasting Bush with Nixon, who had a reputation for intelligence but attained it by diligent study and hard work.

In the course of discussing Vice President Cheney's heart condition -- Dean argues that it is even worse than is commonly let on -- comes this comment:

I wasn't aware of that. I guess they prefer not to publicize the physical assaults. Then again, I wonder how easily they could be kept quiet in this century.

Discussing the Moynihan book, Dean discussed how appalled the late senator was at how many routine documents were classified as secret, leading him to refer to "literally mountains of highly classified documents". I suppose they might have been literal mountains, but I think figurative mountains were more likely.

Two factual errors I noted, or at least one. In a list of conservatives who opposed broadening the government's powers under the stupidly named Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act -- hey, look at what it spells! what a coincidence! -- Dean includes "Senator Larry Craig, a Republican from Nebraska". In fact, Sen Craig represents the state of Idaho. Perhaps Dean has him confused with Nebraska Republican Sen Chuck Hagel, who has also been critical of the USA-PATRIOT Act.

The other one I'm not so sure of. Dean mentions "nineteen foreign-born hijackers with box cutters". Didn't one of the investigations determine that the hijackers did not use box cutters and that was just a rumor that got out of hand? Or did I just imagine that?

In the acknowledgments, only two pages of them, Dean credits his copyeditor by name, Steve Lamont. Mr Lamont can be proud, as it is a well-crafted book and easy to read. On the very same page, alas, is the book's one and only blatant typo, where Dean acknowledges the man who is presumably his manager but is credited instead as his "manger".

This is the first book I've both started and finished after deciding that I'm going to keep track of typos, so I'm confident that's the only case of blatant mistyping. Other errors are more marginal: Phillip D. Zelikow, executive director of the 9/11 Commission, gets his name hyphenated over a line break as "Ze-likow"; assuming the first syllable is stressed and pronounced like "Zell", I think that should be "Zel-ikow". In a footnote, David e. Sanger, an author whose newspaper article is cited, gets his name spelled with a lowercase middle initial. I don't know if that's intentional.

I didn't read all the footnotes, that's just one that I happened to check. Again, I need to correct myself. I can't shake the habit of calling them footnotes, but these are in fact endnotes, which I'm told is the proper name for notes that appear together at the end of the book, usually keyed by numbers. Footnotes are often keyed by asterisks and appear at the foot of the page where they are referenced. This book, in fact, has both footnotes and endnotes. In one of the true footnotes, Dean refers to Cardinal Richelieu by his full name, which comes out as "Armand-Jean du Plessis, Cardinal and Duke de Richelieu". That last bit looks wrong to me. I'm OK with the "and", but if he's a duke then it should be "Duke of"; if you want to use de then he ought to be Duc de Richelieu. I don't think there's any definitive right or wrong on this, but that's what makes sense to me.

Another (true) footnote offers up a quote which has a closed bracket after the second word, but not open bracket anywhere. Unless that's some strange quoting convention I'm not aware of, that has to be another typo.

Yet another footnote (perhaps the footnotes weren't proofed as carefully) refers to the signators of the Project for a New American Century's famous 1998 letter. If there's any difference between an signator and a signer, I don't know what it is. Merriam Webster doesn't list signator at all.

There was only one addition to my vocabulary in this book, but it was a doozy. Usually the new words I find look vaguely familiar, but eleemosynary was so completely unknown to me that it looked like gibberish. Merriam Webster tells me that it means "of, relating to, or supported by charity", and that double e is not a typo (six syllables!). Dean writes, "If you do not know it, let me tell you that it is not good citizenship or eleemosynary emotions that drive campaign contributors." Lovely!

Referring to a certain polemic written by Christopher Hitchens, Dean calls it "Hitchens's The Case Against Henry Kissinger." Now I know there many different opinions on when to use 's for a possessive and when to use an apostrophe alone, but it's rare for me to encounter someone who is further to the 's end of the spectrum than I am. Some people like only the apostrophe for any word ending in s, and some go still further to apply lone apostrophes after sibilant x's and z's, yielding such monstrosities as "Groucho Marx' eyebrows" or "Pedro Martinez' fastballs". I prefer the relatively strict rule that says use a lone apostrophe only if it "looks like a plural and sounds like a plural". I then go a step further and construe the "looks like" test rather strictly, so that to me "Stevens" looks like a plural but "James" does not. But even I would acknowledge that "Hitchens" looks like a plural. "Hitchens's" seems excessive. Is there any name that this editor would make into a possessive by adding only an apostrophe?

At the end of chapter three, Dean tells us that he has not "cataloged" all the efforts of Bush and Cheney to control government information relating to their presidency. I would have said "catalogued", but Merriam Webster acknowledges either spelling.

The phrase "their presidency" is no accident, by the way. A major theme of the book is that Dean believes that Cheney is acting essentially as a co-president, a theory which was popular early in Bush's term but which I haven't heard much since. I suppose I might have mentioned that in the course of my review, but then again, let's face it, for all my talk I really didn't review the actual content of the book much at all.

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