[Young's and Turner's] criticism misunderstands my argument. It's true that I didn't, in the post they take issue with, explicitly address the concern about public honesty. But one can't say everything at once. This is an issue I have in fact dealt with on my blog. I've argued that, if it should be established that either or both of the two leaders were responsible for wilfully deceiving their respective publics, then they 'may be held to democratic account'; '[d]eliberate public deception by democratic politicians is... a vice not to be taken lightly'. (See But where is the green parrot?: old site, August 21.) I've said, also, that questions relating to the use of intelligence in making the case for war are a quite proper subject for investigation. (See The poison in the body politic.)

Officials at the Dallas Zoo are trying to determine how a 300-pound gorilla escaped from its cage Thursday, sending zoo visitors scurrying for safety.

The animal injured four people, including a toddler, before being shot and killed by police.

Rivers Noah, 3, suffered multiple bites to his head and chest. His 26-year-old mother, Keisha Heard, tells The Early Show co-anchor Rene Syler Friday morning, "Rivers is doing OK. He’s sleeping right now and he’s still in a lot of pain, as myself, but we’ll be OK. I think we’re going to make it through this."

The gorilla bit Heard on the legs and threw her and the toddler against a wall Thursday. Dr. Todd Maxson, who treated Rivers, says, “I think he’s going to do very well from all this. He should make a full recovery.” Dr. Maxson is director of trauma services at Children's Medical Center in Dallas.

Proposal for Alameda Firing Range With Targets of Armor Clad Live Monkeys

Editor,

Two years ago, my life took a strange turn when I lost an eye to an angry black-and-white Colobus monkey while on an African safari. Since that time, I have moved to Alameda to pursue my dream of creating a firing range featuring little monkeys called Bad Monkey Ranch. The monkeys would feature full body suits of premium alloy protection to shield them from rifle and pistol shots. I currently own three healthy monkeys that I blast with a rifle every day. Although my idea may sound far fetched, numerous studies have shown that monkeys exposed to life-threatening bursts of adrenaline on a daily basis actually live longer compared to those monkeys cooped up in zoos.

Not only will the monkeys have a great time roaming free in a field of gunfire, but the citizens of Alameda, who have been victims of a monkey attack will have an opportunity to seek vengeance in a healthy, life-preserving manner. According to an independent survey, over a half-dozen people living in Alameda have experienced a monkey attack within the past twenty years. These numbers are sure to increase and thus the number of people seeking a monkey firing range will grow infinitely in the years to come.

Unfortunately, animal rights organizations, the City of Alameda, and the Alameda Times-Star have balked at my idea. The Times-Star even had the nerve to call me "crazy" in a recent phone conversation. The public deserves to know about the quasi-tyrannical local government that rules the city of Alameda with no concern for those wishing to let off steam by firing on a feisty little monkey.

Thank you to all citizens in the City of Alameda who have supported the effort to build Bad Monkey Ranch.

Sincerely,
Richard Mendoza

Taxpaying citizen
Founder, Bad Monkey Ranch
Alameda, CA

Again and again I read -- or hear directly from administration supporters -- this excuse that any questioning of the administration's record in foreign affairs, or Iraq, or even on other matters is just a deplorable focusing on the past, a distraction,
when the nation faces grave challenges which we need to focus on solving.

This is more than just simple buck-passing. It is a sort of through-the-looking-glass version of how problem-solving and accountability are supposed to work. It also has the perverse benefit of allowing the scope of the administration's failures to become reasons for not discussing those failures -- a sort of self-reinforcing anti-accountability causality loop, with all manner of moral hazards built in.

We've created such a mess that we don't have the time or the luxury to start second-guessing how badly we screwed things up!

I've always been strict about keeping four-letter words off this site. So I apologize for the graphic nature of this analogy. But this is like I come back to my office to find my new employee has taken a crap right on my desk.

Puzzledly and not happy, I say, "What, umm ... what happened here?"

To which he replies, "There you go again, always focusing on the past, how this or that could have been done differently, when what's really important is the future, how we deal with this and other challenges we're going to face."

To which I would reply, "No. The future is exactly what I'm thinking about. And that's why you're fired. Because in the future I can't afford to have anyone working here who craps on my desk, and then when I confront them about it all they can do is dodge responsibility with moronic excuses and try to put the blame on me for asking what the hell is going on."

These guys should be fired too.

And, no, I wouldn't advise the Kerry campaign to base a 30 second ad on this analogy.

Barack....Obama!
He's solid as a rock...Obama!

So far, Bush['s ads have] managed to offend the majority of Americans through his use of September 11th, piss off firefighters for hiring fake ones in his ads, and provide weird fake numbers for Kerry in his first attack ad. (Ignore the "gotta get 'em all" bit about Kerry, which isn't really equivalent at all, but seems to have been thrown in to provide the weird semblance of balance that's all the rage these days.) And now, this.

Bush's campaign wasn't responsible for the Medicare ads, but his administration and his political advisors sure were. It brings up to mind a theory that I've been rolling around since Saddam was captured: the Bush administration was one that basically had events thrust upon it. It's even campaigning as such - everything about Bush's presidency was reactive, so nothing it did was actually its responsibility. Congress made him! Terrorists made him! "Activist judges" made him! Zohar the Incredulous and his team of four-armed invisible napalm-skinned ninjas made him do it! (It's the napalm that gets you every time.)

These guys really do act like Vito Corleone, don't they? They knew their estimates were bogus five months before the bill was passed, they refused to let their chief actuary tell anyone about it, and one of their stooges basically told him to either shut up or sleep with the fishes. Then, a mere few weeks after the bill is passed, they fess up to the higher cost and pretend they didn't know about it before.

You know something's amiss when a campaign rolls out positive ads one week and then hurries out negative and cutting ones just a week later.

In any case, the new Bush ads out today say John Kerry "wanted to delay defending America until the United Nations approved."

Really?

When was that?

al-Hayat newspaper maintains that it was told by a high French official that Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani opposes the return to Iraq of special UN envoy Lakhdar Brahimi. He is said to be happy with the Shiite majority on the Interim Governing Council, and to fear that Brahimi will toss aside that body rather than expanding it and keeping a Shiite majority.

The French source also said that the Americans have, behind the scenes, given secret undertakings to the Kurds that they can have Kirkuk and will be able to enjoy a semi-independence from the government in Baghdad. He sources these promises to Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz.

So, you're a parent who's concerned with your child's education (and/or test scores) and you want to give that child a leg up on the competition.... you have two options when it comes to English. The test-intensive option would be the infamous juku, or "cram schools". After the kid's been at school all day, doesn't it seem like a good idea for him or her to come home, eat dinner, and then spend a few more hours at yet another school? Hey, if you want the kid to get into a good high school and so on, this beats the hell out of eikaiwa... no doubt. The one weakness of the English juku is that the kid might win a place in Waseda's freshmen class due in part to the written test results, but drop the kid in Seattle with the mission of finding his or her way to the airport and... well, forget it, he'll probably end up gutting salmon or turning tricks for the year that it takes him to stumble across the Japanese consulate. No conversation skills, you see.

What about eikaiwa, then? These programs (of which I am a temporary denizen) emphasize conversation. We like to sell parents on the idea that emphasizing conversation (and related grammar) would be better in the long run... and it will surely help those test scores. The reality? Well, I can do a lot with a small group of eager, interested, and clever primary school kids. They'll definitely outshine their peers a bit once they get to junior high, and they'll probably have much better pronounciation for the rest of their (English speaking) lives. I have one girl who is in her first year of high school... she loves the subject, and she wants to learn. I can tell her parents in all honestly that their money is well spent. The simple majority of the kids under my wing, however, are not interested; they are coerced.

The youngest kid in the class is a boy who... uh... well... His biscuits aren't done. His elevator doesn't go to the top. He's got one rowboat and one oar. Last week, he spent most of the class repeating the word penisu ("penis") over and over because it sounds like the word tenisu ("tennis"... as in, "Can you play tennis?" ..."Yes, I can"). He's the kid that couldn't even keep up with memorizing basic questions and answers, much less wrap his unmotivated intellect around my attempt at explaining verb conjugation (at the insistence of the parents... that I focus on juku-type material that's absolutely over their heads). So, I scolded him over the penis thing. He got quiet for a while. Then, we played a version of Uno that requires the kids to say things like "This is a blue seven".... the only thing he likes about the hour, and he likes it a lot. I always try to do at least one fun thing, usually at the end.

Well, he was winning, and he forgot to say "Uno".... five penalty cards (I'd have let it pass, but not his peers).... one, two (an astonished look), three, four (anger), five (dialating capillaries, mucous, wincing).... followed by throwing the cards across the room, hitting his brother, kicking the table over and over, screaming... I said, "Hey, that's tough luck.. if you want to take a break, you can go outside for a minute"... He then began to direct his screams at me for a brief moment, then stormed out of the room and made for the front door, where his mother caught him. They struggled for a long three minutes, then disappeared upstairs.

Here's a suggestion. Those who opposed the war in the full knowledge, or some reasonable level of knowledge, of the character and record of the Saddam regime, had their reasons; and while some of these reasons weren't good ones, some of them also were: amongst which I would put the concern about international law, the principle of adhering to established multilateral procedures and the fears about the level of likely casualties, both civilian and military. I would hypothesize, however, that with many if not all of the opponents of the war who were genuinely attached to these considerations and not merely using them as a cynical cover for something else, there will have been some sense of, some feeling for, the considerations pulling in the other direction, the ones that I've invoked above under the formula of a common humanity. So my suggestion is as follows. People who opposed the war but with a proper sense of the other considerations, the ones that moved us left-liberal supporters of the war, should be willing to move on. All said and done, they didn't agree with what was done, but what was done removed a scourge and they will recognize that and look to what is now the best possible course forward for the people of Iraq. And those, on the other hand, who can't move on? It's hard not to conclude that what they want is an alibi. It seems that the considerations which moved us to support the war were not only outweighed for them by their reasons against the war; they just don't count for very much at all. If that's how you think, then you better make real sure that people are talking about something else.

Mr. Geras:

I appreciated several of the points made in your post today ("Sovereignty and humanity"). I especially agree with (and offer myself as evidence of) the observation that those who opposed (in Daniel Davies' apt construction) "this war now" were not immune, must not have been immune, to the humanitarian concerns that you, I think accurately, describe as eventually trumping objective limitations based upon national sovereignty. For my part, I believe that we were, if anything, late to take the action that we did, and that we should have acted in force in response to the provocations of Saddam in 1998, when the coalition of 1992 was still in essential agreement. I have spent the last 6 months working very closely with a group of recent Iraqi emigres, and more than half of them had horrific stories of imprisonment and torture. Ending that pain is a common-sense good. That it is good is not seriously to be disputed.

However, I do not believe that the conclusion that you reach, that such opponents of the war are now obligated to embrace the humanitarian benefits and move on from criticism of the means, is justified. Criticism of both the Blair and Bush governments over manipulation of intelligence are salient criticisms of a failure to govern properly, and are appropriate criticisms to be levied against any government, regardless of the outcome of the deception. There is sufficient evidence to support a credible allegation that the Bush administration, for its part, relentlessly and publicly hyped damning factoids while intentionally ignoring or downplaying substantial countervailing advice and information produced by the US intelligence apparatus. The final truth of this allegation may be argued; it must be argued.

A critic of the policy of Bush or Blair is not necessarily advocating the re-installation of Saddam Hussein, or the re-assignment to him of the mantle of national sovereignty. Nor is such criticism likely to have any such effect. If the point of your post is that critics need to adapt themselves to a fundamental, irreversible change, and be happy that a scourge has been lifted from a suffering people, then it is equally true that careful review of the policies that brought us here is not significantly damaging to that result. Saddam is gone, and will never again rule in Iraq or anywhere. Bush and Blair still govern, and their practices, past and future, are still very much an appropriate subject for public debate.

Again, for my part, my frustration at the WMD deception (and I think the evidence is sufficient to call it that), is that it represented a missed opportunity to forge a consensus behind the kind of humanitarian action that is now the last pillar standing of the case for war. It's a strong enough pillar to stand alone. But it was not the basis chosen by those who advocated war. The willingness to disguise motives and relevant facts is simply bad government.

We can't ignore the means, for the simple reason that not all ends are noble.

- Stuart

The White House will attack whoever we choose; those attacks may be less effective against Edwards [because of his relatively short record], but they will still come. Regardless, we cannot begin picking nominees based upon how little they've done, how much of a blank slate they are. I fear a country where the best type of candidate for President is some rich guy with a good back story and a short voting record. Public service is noble, being a senator is worthy of admiration, not scorn. We have to turn these attacks around, we have to reframe the arguments. More importantly, we have to stop running from them.