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The attack on "a disingenuous filmmaker" appears in the prepared text of Sen. John McCain's speech last night to the Republican National Convention. Did he miscalculate by not knowing, as he claims, that the object of his scorn was in the house? Did he not realize his attack would boomerang, as I believe it did, for the TV audience?

After Republican delegates erupted in chants of "Four more years!" at McCain's mention of the unnamed filmaker, the television cameras caught sight of Michael Moore in the press gallery. Playing the moment with a quick wit, Moore held up two fingers and shot back: "Two more months!" From where I sat, watching the convention on the tube at home, it was impossible to hear Moore's words over the roar of the delegates. But he mouthed them too clearly to miss. It was a powerful riposte, more effective for having to read his lips than actually hearing his words.

Moore was in the press gallery observing the convention for an op-ed column for USA Today. In Monday's column, headlined "The GOP doesn't reflect America," he wrote:

Hanging out around the convention, I've encountered a number of the Republican faithful who aren't delegates. They warm up to me when they don't find horns or a tail. Talking to them, I discover they're like many people who call themselves Republicans but aren't really Republicans. At least not in the radical-right way that George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, John Ashcroft and Co. have defined Republicans. ...

I've often found that if I go down the list of "liberal" issues with people who say they're Republican, they are quite liberal and not in sync with the Republicans who run the country. Most don't want America to be the world's police officer and prefer peace to war. They applaud civil rights, believe all Americans should have health insurance and think assault weapons should be banned. Though they may personally oppose abortion, they usually don't think the government has the right to tell a women what to do with her body.

Moore's a smart guy. He probably took his cue from Louis Menand. Remember what Menand wrote in The New Yorker last week in his dissection of the electorate? Citing Stanford social scientist Morris Fiornia, as noted here a week ago in WEATHERING THE SHORTCUTS, Menand wrote that there is no culture war among Americans at large, despite polls indicating that the public is polarized into a "red state-blue state" paradigm. Opinions on most hot-button issues do not differ significantly between voters in red states and voters in blue states.

Here's hoping it's true -- because if it is, then "Two more months!" won't be a hope but a prediction.

Postscript: It's odd that Washington Post reporters Mark Leibovich and Paul Farhi make no mention of Moore's riposte in their news story about the attention he drew at the convention. But if you click on the video attached to their story, "McCain Criticizes Moore in Speech," and keep watching, you'll see it: It's unmistakable.

What does the Nincompoop in Chief really mean? It all depends on the nuance of "I don't think you can win it," his statement about the war on terrorism in answer to a question from the "Today" show's Matt Lauer. Now the AP reports:

In a speech to the national convention of the American Legion, Bush said, "We meet today in a time of war for our country, a war we did not start yet one that we will win." ...

That statement differed from Bush's earlier comment, aired Monday in a pre-taped television interview, that "I don't think you can win" the war on terror.

Yes, we know: The ninny's spokesman trotted out to translate the original statement for us. The ninny merely meant there would be no formal declaration of victory. Get it? No concluded agreement, no signing ceremony, no diplomats smiling for the cameras and exchanging pens. "In this different kind of war," the ninny now says, "we may never sit down at a peace table. But make no mistake about it, we are winning and we will win."

English is such a rich language, magical even. Who knew a simple declarative sentence made of seven one-syllable words, "I don't think you can win it," could be made to have so many shades of meaning?

Because we're recovering from the anemic gathering of protesters in Central Park that followed yesterday's massive anti-Bush march, beautifully described by Robert D. McFadden as "a roaring two-mile river of demonstrators," we leave today's commentary to pop expert Ryan McGee's running account of the really important stuff: last night's MTV Video Music Awards.

This not only gives us a rest. It fills a celebrity gap here at ArtsJournal, which chooses not to acknowledge this annual celebration of frivolous cultural attainment and hence dismisses its significance as a parody of human achievement. So here's a taste of McGee's minute-by-minute self-sacrifice:

6:45 pm: No Doubt is being interviewed by John (N to the Nizzle) Norris. This will appear on the next No Doubt DVD under the featurette "When Gwen Realized She Didn't Need These Guys Anymore."
6:54 pm: Alicia Keyes just promised I'd never forget her performance. What I'm sure I'll never forget is the dead beaver that up and lept on her head.
6:57 pm: They released Kurt Loder from his cryogenic chamber to help host the pre-show. This guy ages in Dick Clark years. Stunning.
7:15 pm: I'm now downstairs in the living room on the roommate's computer. 27" TV in front of me, surround sound speakers, and a laptop all in the same room. And yet, they're threatening to let Ashlee Simpson perform after the commercial break.
7:22 pm: Kurt: "So what's your album like, Paris?" Paris: "It comes out in January." Wow. Sometimes brevity is the soul of wit, and sometimes it's the soul of Mistress Skankula.
7:29 pm: I'm going to leave it up to the professionals to explain why Bruce Willis showed up on P. Diddy's boat. And why Naomi Campbell's doing her impression of Imam in the Michael Jackson "Remember the Time" video.
7:32 pm: In the category of 'White People Saying Things They Shouldn't," Bruce just told John No-No-Norris that, "I'm just here running with my friend Sean." White people shouldn't run with anybody unless it's David Lee Roth and he's running with the devil. It's just a personal opinion. Like Andre 3000, I'm just being honest.

When you read the full version, forgive his errors: McGee believes in typing as fast as he can. For really more important stuff, Howell Raines in The Guardian does the job on how the Bush brain ticks.

They're two for the books. Both are in denial and cannot be believed. Either they're born liars or they've learned how to lie with impunity. Or, to be charitable, they're simply ignorant of their own policies and decisions.

THE RUMMY

After a week of news stories with these headlines about the Abu Ghraib interrogation-cum-torture scandal, "Inquiry Faults Intelligence Unit for Abuses at Iraqi Prison" and "Report Is Likely to Prompt Criminal Charges" and "A Trail of 'Major Failures' Leads to Defense Secretary's Office" and "Findings on Abu Ghraib Prison: Sadism, 'Deviant Behavior' and a Failure of Leadership," Rummy Boy had the gall to tell two separate audiences in Phoenix there was no evidence that prisoners had been abused during interrogations.

The first time he "misspoke," on the radio, his exact words were, "I have not seen anything thus far that says that the people abused were abused in the process of interrogating them or for interrogation purposes." The second time, at a news conference, he repeated that and added, "all of the press, all of the television thus far that tried to link the abused that took place to interrogation techniques in Iraq has not been demonstrated." (Italics mine.)

After an aide slipped him a note, Rummy Boy conceded that "two or three" cases of abuse had, in fact, been found by the Army investigation. But even his correction was a "mischaracterization," to put it politely. "In fact," according to reporter Eric Schmitt, "the Army inquiry found that 13 or 44 instances of abuse involved interrogations or the interrogation process. The [inquiry] report itself explicitly describes the extent to which each abuse involved interrogations."

THE DUMMY

After news stories this week with these headlines, "Administration Shifts on Global Warming" and "U.S. Report Turns Focus to Greenhouse Gases," the Nincompoop in Chief has denied the shift, then claimed ignorance of it -- "Ah, we did? I don't think so" -- even though the report is online, as reporter Andrew C. Revkin points out, and "is accompanied by a letter signed by Mr. Bush's secretaries of energy and commerce and his science adviser."

The story in The New York Times characterized the report to Congress as "a striking shift in the way the Bush administration has portrayed the science of climate change ... indicating that emissions of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases are the only likely explanation for global warming over the last three decades." The Washington Post was more modest, saying merely that the report "goes further than previous statements by President Bush."

Here -- from the transcript of an interview by reporters Elisabeth Bumiller and David Sanger -- is the Nincompoop in Chief conceding, finally, that maybe he doesn't know what's going on:

Ms. Bumiller: Mr. President, why did your administration change its position on what causes global warming?
THE PRESIDENT: I don't think we did.
Ms. Bumiller: According to --
THE PRESIDENT: I don't think so, Elisabeth.
Ms. Bumiller: You said that it's almost certainly carbon monoxide -- which you hadn't said in the past, carbon dioxide.
THE PRESIDENT: I think that was my position during the campaign, if I'm not mistaken.
Ms. Bumiller: It changed --
At this point the Nincompoop's spokesman interrupts: "You're talking about the National Academy of Science report?" Ms. Bumiller replies: "Yes, yes." As if to say, "What the hell else could we be talking about?" To which the Nincompoop's spokesman offers typical boilerplate that his boss "has done a lot in terms of climate change" blahblahblah.
THE PRESIDENT: Let me get back with you on that, because I think you might -- I don't know why you said what you just said.
Ms. Bumiller: Well, we had a story in the paper this morning saying that you issued a report saying --
THE PRESIDENT: Oh, okay, well, that's got to be true.

Which makes everything all better, right? We know the Nincompoop in Chief doesn't read newspapers if he can help it -- or so he's said -- but short of finding out what his own policies are from his own appointees, he ought to start having somebody read the newspapers to him. Laura has said she does, but apparently she skips the important stuff.

Message from the Op-Ed editor of a major European newspaper:

You have obviously not received the e-mail where I told you that you will not be paid, due to customs regulations within the European Union and to the U.S. Patriot Act. But we will send a nice tablecloth with our company logo.

The guy has a great sense of humor. He assures me I'll be paid any minute now. The piece, which he requested, ran more than a month ago.

MAKE 'EM PAY

Here's a tip for the TV networks
That's hardly controversial:
Charge the same for politcal conventions
As for any infomercial.

-- Leon Freilich

Now that David Hockney's controversial theory about the use of lenses and optical devices by Renaissance painters is being disputed again -- this time by computer experts, as reported yesterday by the Sunday Herald in Scotland and today by The New York Times -- it may be worth revisiting a lecture he gave on the subject at both Columbia University and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1999, two years before the publication of his book, "Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters."

The lecture reminds us that his theory has everything to do with a reverence for drawing and not, as his opponents tend to assert, with its devaluation. This report is reprinted from MSNBC.com © 1999.

ART AND TECH: AN INTIMATE, EARLY MIX

David Hockney gives art history a closer look, and greater relevancy to the present

By Jan Herman
MSNBC

NEW YORK, Nov. 4, 1999 -- The idea that European painters from the 1500s on commonly used lenses and optical devices as tools of their trade has a special resonance for David Hockney, who believes that art must find its roots in drawing again and that drawing-by-other-means -- digital imaging via computer, for example -- has already begun that rediscovery.

"What's interesting today," Hockney says, "is what is happening to photography now that the computer has come along. Actually, the hand is coming back into the camera. What is called manipulation of photographs, I call drawing. What's really happening is that we are beginning to draw through the camera, through the lens."

Hockney relishes the proposition that art and technology had an intimate connection much earlier than generally asserted and that acknowledging the connection with the proper emphasis gives the history of Western art greater relevancy to the present.

In a recent lecture at Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism co-sponsored by the National Arts Journalism Program with The School of the Arts and the Department of Art History, Hockney elaborated on these ideas, most of which he had outlined the previous week at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

"The whole point," he said, "is that we have moved into a period where the photograph has lost its veracity. You don't necessarily have to believe anything that's happening in a photograph. We did believe it for a certain length of time, or thought we did.

"Now there's no need to believe it at all, meaning that photography is in a sense back with drawing and painting, actually like drawing and painting. Nobody foresaw that happening. That's why it's interesting to look back into the history of European painting and to see how the lens was used with the hand."

Hockney contends that the use of lenses as an aid to draftsmanship -- helping artists see the curvature of space, so to speak -- explains more than any other single reason why "there is no awkward drawing, none," in almost 400 years of Western art until the late 19th century.

When Cezanne came along in 1870 and rejected the lens, his influence (especially on the French Impressionists), combined with the rise of chemical photography, altered the way painters chose to look at the world and obscured the hand-lens connection.

Moreover, the development of lenses and optical devices can be traced in paintings themselves, without reference to historical documents, simply by observing the increasingly sophisticated changes in painted or drawn perspective: They went from simple mathematical and geometric foreshortening to the more complex, purposeful distortions of telescopic and telephoto effects.

Here are some of Hockney's remarks from his illustrated lecture at Columbia:

TWO MEN AND A LUTE

"In 1525 Dürer makes an engraving of two men drawing a lute. The lute is very difficult to draw, he's telling you. Supremely difficult. ... Holbein's 'The Ambassadors' is painted in 1533, only eight years after Dürer made that engraving. ... Well, Holbein does a lute not bad. ... His painting is made with an unbelievable accuracy for everything. ... The [fabric] patterns are amazingly accurate. They tilt when [the cloth] folds. The pattern follows the folds. Geometry wouldn't do that. So I thought, 'It was lenses.' ...

"Then in 1590 Caravaggio paints a picture in which he not only does a lute in marvelous perspective, he throws in a violin, also in perfect perspective. You can even read all the music. Now how did he do it? ... I suggest that lenses were used and that they were more advanced lenses than previously.

THE POPE AND HIS LENS

"I went to Caravaggio straight away, because people often thought Caravaggio did use lenses, did use optics, because there are no drawings. He didn't make drawings. ... Going back further than Caravaggio, I'm going to Raphael [who] painted [a] portrait of the pope in 1518. If you notice, very, very accurate fabrics. Extremely accurate shadows. And in his hand the pope's got a lens the size of the diameter of a can of beans. The size of Caravaggio's lens was two cans of beans. He had a telephoto lens. ...

"Well, who, you might ask would have the best lenses, the scientists or the pope? Well, I think the pope would have the best lenses then, and the image makers would have the best lenses because images were considered more powerful at that time. ... This is Raphael's pope, 1518, with a pretty good lens. This is Velazquez's pope, 1650, probably with an even better lens. ...

PRE-RAPHAELITE, PRE-LENS?

"[Notice] Raphael of different years. [In] 1505, not much pattern in his sleeves…. By the time he gets to 1518, there's a very elaborate pattern following the forms. … He's able to do it precisely. … Is it just another skill he learned? Is it just that? I don't think so. I think it's use of optics. That's what I'm saying. ...

Detail of Jean-Auguste Dominique Ingres' "Comtesse Charles d'Agoult, née Marie de Flavigny, and Her Daughter Claire d'Agoult," 1849, graphite with white highlights on paper. The highly detailed rendering of the patterns and folds of fabric indicate the artist's likely use of a lens.

"Historically ... after the invention of chemicals with the lens, which meant photography, painting veers off and that was 1870 in France -- Cezanne and the Impressionists. ... In England they had an odd movement, they called themselves pre-Raphaelites. ... Do you think they were just [pre-Raphaelite] in a literary way, not in a visual way? Getting at something about pre-lens? I don't know ... I'm just pointing it out. ... "

"It would be sad if anybody thought what I am saying [about the use of lenses] diminished anything. On the contrary, it makes it far more interesting and far more interesting to us today. The great skills took a long time. As I point out, look at Frans Hals and at his contemporaries. They had the same tool. They just didn't have the same heart, or the hand. And that makes the difference."

A friend writes:

Was one of Kerry's wounds to a vital kernel of the frontal lobe? He and the feckless fuckers in his braintrust are handing the country to the insects, and those hungry critters will devour what little of value remains. Quite an achievement. Maybe another medal for the chest of a man with the jawbone and the heart of an ass.

-- Thine, Terry Dactyl

The formidable Mr. Dactyl apparently agrees with what the redoubtable Kevin Phillips said in the last paragraph of REPORT FROM THE LAND OF IS in May: "If Kerry wants to be stamped second-rate he can keep on being a stiff. He'll join Dukakis and Gore. But if Kerry loses, historians will have to put him in a category not invented yet."

Remember the mysterious black barge anchored in the Hudson River between the Manhattan and Jersey shores during our Code Orange New Year eight months ago? Well, the barge is back. Make that two of them. And just in time for the National Republican Convention at Madison Square Garden, which will be protected by "the largest armada of land, air and maritime forces ever assembled to provide security at a national political gathering."

Our Upper West Side spotter, who checked the barges out yesterday with her binoculars, wonders whether they're platforms for guided-missile launchers to protect the city from an airborne attack. The last time they appeared in the river we never did solve the barge mystery. This morning's report on convention security in The New York Times makes no mention of missile launchers stationed in the Hudson. It does say that 26 police launches will patrol the city's waterways and that seven surveillance helicopters will be patrolling the skies.

I guess we should also mention the 181 bomb-sniffing dogs to be put on the streets and subways, in additon to plainclothes detectives who will "eyeball" other riders, along with 10,000 police officers to be stationed around Madison Square Garden itself, including "special heavily armed 'Hercules' antiterror squads, snipers and phalanxes of officers set up around the arena to search buses and trucks."

And let's not forget: The police will have on hand a bit of high-tech sonic weaponry just in case noisy demonstrators need to be brought into line. As reported by the Associated Press, it was unveiled last week as part of  "a mini-arsenal of devices and counterterrorism equipment." Called the LRAD (for Long Range Acoustic Device), the weapon was "developed for the military and [is] capable of blasting warnings, orders or anything else at an ear-splitting 150 decibels."

The police plan to mount two LRADS on Humvees posted outside the arena. "It would mark the first time the instrument -- which can beam sounds for 300 yards or more -- has been used by a civilian force." This does not go down well with Bill Dobbs of United for Peace and Justice, which has planned a massive antiwar demonstration on the eve of the convention. He called the sound system "a potential Big Brother nightmare." Police "are trying to use technology and machinery to control every aspect of life on the street," he said, "rather than relax a little and let a part of democratic society unfold."

Compared with infrasound, however, the LRAD is a light tap on the shoulder. Imagine the authorities getting hold of one of French robotics scientist Vladimir Gavreau's "police whistle," sometimes called a "sound cannon." It's an infrasonic device so lethal there is reportedly no known defense against it. By lowering the frequency of sound below 15 cycles per second -- so low that the sound can't be humanly heard -- such a device is capable of spreading death and destruction from a source that is impossible to detect without special equipment.

"At a very specific pitch, infrasound explodes matter," Gerry Vassilatos writes about Gavreau's experiments from the 1930s to the 1970s. "At others, infrasound incapacitates and kills. Organisms rupture in its blast."

Years ago, as far back as the 1960s, the author William S. Burroughs wrote about using sound as a weapon. In a wide-ranging 1984 interview, he noted: "It is no exaggeration to say that all important research is now top secret, until someone lets a rat out of the bag. Infrasound, for example." How does infrasound work? Burroughs explained in layman's terms:

As everyone knows, sound is a succession of waves in which the air is alternatively compressed and decompressed. Fast vibrations either go right through solid objects or bounce off them, usually doing relatively little harm even when very powerful. But slow vibration, below the hearing level, can create a sort of pendulum action, a reverberation in solid objects that quickly builds up to intolerable intensity.

To study this phenomenon the [Gavreau] team built a giant whistle, hooked to a compressed air hose. Then they turned on the air. Professor Gavreau says: "Luckily, we were able to turn it off quickly. All of us were sick for hours. Everything in us was vibrating: stomach, heart, lungs. All the people in the other laboratories were sick too. They were very angry with us."

Gavreau discovered that the wave length "most dangerous to human life" is 7 Hertz (seven cycles per second). Some of the invisible injuries to Gavreau and his team were more persistent. According to another account, they "were dangerously ill for days, their internal organs wracked with painful spasms as a result of their body cavities having resonated at the deadly frequency." They had only just escaped being "torn apart" by their own experiment. What's more, "the entire test building was shaken and nearly destroyed."

Claims like that are hard to believe. But others go further. In one test, reportedly "involving a device less than a cubic metre in volume," Gavreau's team "caused a large, fan-shaped portion of Marseilles to shake. Later, a mounted and remotely controlled version [of the device] was said to have 'burst heavy battlements and tank interiors open with a hideous effortlessness.'"

And Burroughs notes:

In developing a military weapon, scientists intend to revert to a policeman's whistle form, perhaps as big as eighteen feet across, mount it on a truck and blow it with a fan turned by a small airplane engine. This weapon, they say, will give forth an all-destroying 10,000 acoustic watts. It could kill a man five miles away. There is one snag: at present, the machine is as dangerous to its operators as to the enemy.

That wouldn't deter suicide infrasounders. But we're grateful for the snag. In any case, he was talking about the situation in 1984. What has been developed since? For a more recent, extended essay on infrasound weaponry, see "Sonic Doom," an article by Jack Sergeant and David Sutton in the Fortean Times. They debunk the effectiveness of such weapons.

Although Vassilatos writes that "infrasound does not lose its intensity when travelling very long distances across the ground" and remains "at the same intensity as when released," Sergeant and Sutton contradict him. They write:

The main difficulty lies in propagating the sound waves over distance to their intended target, a possibility hampered by the tendency of low-frequency waves to expand in all directions, thus losing focused power, and of high-frequency waves to enter a "shocked state" where energy is lost to the air.

So sonic weapons, even those employing ultrasound and infrasound, would only work over very short distances and, rather than resulting in the kinds of psychological or physical effects claimed by conspiracy-heads or military nuts, would probably just cause serious and permanent hearing damage.

Their conclusion? "Sonic weapons, despite the oft-repeated claims, would most likely be large, cumbersome, close-range devices resulting in ruptured eardrums." Who is correct? Whom to believe? We don't know. But we'd hate like hell to find out at the National Republican Convention.

How cozy it all is: Rummy Boy's "leadership of the Pentagon has been weighed by a jury of his peers and found somewhat wanting," The Washington Post reported today. But the conclusion of "the blue-ribbon panel" -- appointed by Rummy Boy to review the role of the Pentagon in the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, and led by former Defense Secretary James R. Schlesinger -- "does not appear to threaten Rumsfeld's position as defense secretary, especially because all four panel members emphatically rejected the idea of calling for his resignation." This is separate from the latest Army investigation, which failed to sanction Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez. Sy Hersh must still be laughing.

Let's be grateful that Louis Menand did not become a brain surgeon. If he had, he probably would never have found the time to apply his scalpel to intellectual history, as he did in his spellbinding best-seller, "The Metaphyical Club," or as he does in "The Unpolitical Animal," his dissection of how voters think, in the current New Yorker.

To get a true sense of Menand's surgical skills, you have to read the New Yorker piece in its entirety. It's short anyway, and a mere summary won't do. But just to whet your appetite, here -- chosen at random -- are some of the things he notes as he reviews various political theories based on "Winning Elections: Political Campaign Management, Strategy & Tactics" by Ron Faucheux and Ronald A. Faucheux; a 1964 article by political scientist Bruce M. Sabin on "The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics"; as well as a 2004 paper written by Princeton political scientists Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels; a theory of shortcuts, particularly the ideas of M.I.T. professor Samuel Popkin; and "Culture War? The Myth of a Polarized America" by Stanford's Morris Fiornia and others:

+ An estimated "2.8 million people voted against Al Gore in 2000 because their states were too dry or two wet" as a consequence of that year's weather patterns. Achen and Bartels think that these voters cost Gore seven states, any one of which would have given him the election.

+ In election years from 1952 to 2000, when people were asked whether they cared who won the Presidential election, between twenty-two and forty-four per cent answered "don't care" or "don't know." In 2000, eighteen per cent said that they decided which Presidential candidate to vote for only in the last two weeks of the campaign; five per cent, enough to swing most elections, decided the day they voted.

+ The most widely known fact about George H.W. Bush in the 1992 election was that he hated broccoli. Eighty-six percent of likely voters in that election knew that the Bushes's dog's name was Millie; only 15 percent knew that Bush and Clinton both favored the death penalty.

+ Three theories have arisen. The first is that electoral outcomes, as far as "the will of the people" is concerned, are essentially arbitrary. The fraction of the electorate that responds to substantive political arguments is hugely outweighed by the fraction that responds to slogans, misinformation, "fire alarms" (sensational news), "October surprises" (last-minute sensational news), random personal associations, and "gotchas."

+ A second theory is that although people may not be working with a full deck of information and beliefs, their preferences are dictated by something, and that something is �lite opinion. Therefore, democracies are really oligarchies with a populist face.

+ The third theory of democratic politics is the theory that the cues to which most voters respond are, in fact, adequate bases on which to form political preferences. People use shortcuts -- the social-scientific term is "heuristics" -- to reach judgments about political candidates, and, on the whole, these shortcuts are as good as the long and winding road of reading party platforms, listening to candidate debates, and all the other elements of civic duty. The will of the people may not be terribly articulate, but it comes out in the wash.

Or in knowing how to eat a tamale. (You have to read the article.)

Finally, there is no culture war among Americans at large, despite polls indicating that the public is polarized into a "red state-blue state" paradigm. Opinions on most hot-button issues do not differ significantly between voters in red states and voters in blue states. "What has become polarized, Fiornia argues, is the �lite."

Menand's piece would be hilarious, if it weren't so scary.

But where? The Army's investigative report of the Abu Ghraib torture scandal, to be released this week, names the top U.S. commander in Iraq at the time it all happened -- Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez -- for leadership deficiencies and failing to deal with rising problems at the prison, according to this morning's Washington Post. But Sanchez "will not be recommended for any punitive action or even a letter of reprimand," the Post says. Sy Hersh must be laughing like hell.

If you've never received an email message calling for a boycott or a petition to sign, you're probably the only one who hasn't. The latest that came to me said that Germany had decided "to stop all arms sales to Israel," followed by similar bans by other European countries, and asked for a retaliatory boycott of travel to and products from these countries, to show support for Israel.

The Europeans and their Muslim allies should understand that boycotts works both ways. When we said NEVER AGAIN, we meant it. Europe is stuck in the mentality of 1933 and conditioned to thinking of Jews as defenseless entities. The reality is very different. As long as Europe adheres to and supports its primitive Middle Ages death cult, European products must be off limits.

The rest of the message, as given verbatim by boycottwatch.org, a self-described "consumer advocacy organization" that does not do product comparisons or evaluations but tries instead "to make sure consumers are not tricked into believing lies," goes like this:

We continue to call for a complete boycott of travel and products from the following countries France, Belgium, Spain, Germany, Sweden, Switzerland, Norway, Denmark, Holland, and China, due to their support, sponsorship, and/or participation in global Islamic terror. The voting record of the above countries at the UN openly endorses Muslim terror.

Remember, every time you buy a bottle of Evian, a Carlsberg product, a Spanish melon, a Godiva chocolate, a Dior lipstick, a Gucci bag, or a German kitchen appliance, you are financing the next Muslim mass murderer.

The European Union gives over $10 million per month to the Palestinian Authority, knowing full well that the money is funneled to buy, import, and train Muslim terrorists and their weapons of mass murder.

We strongly encourage everyone to buy Canadian, American, Australia, Britain and Israeli products instead. Buy Estee Lauder or Ahava instead of Chanel, Dior, and YSL. Tell the salespeople why. Educate the public when you shop.

Europe is underwriting the Arab war to exterminate the Jewish state. We cannot sit idly by while this happens. Make your voice heard and let them feel the sting in their pocketbooks. Let the Europeans know that supporting terror does not pay.

Please send this to at least 10 like-minded people.

Boycottwatch.org summarizes the message as "a non-verifiable email" and discredits it for various reasons, among them: "Nobody taking responsibility for the boycott call. ... No original contact source for the boycott call. ... No way to verify if the email has been altered."

We asked William Osborne what he thinks of the email. He's not only the smartest, best-informed, most-principled person we know -- pace all our smart, well-informed, principled friends -- but he's an American expatriate activist who has lived in Europe for the past 27 years and has followed the politics of Europe and the Middle East with deep interest and strong historical views about anti-Semitism.

Here's his take:

I hadn't heard about the German embargo on military exports to Israel. The Green Party has a long history of opposition to Israel, but this has little to do with 1933 and much more to do with their leftist and pacifist politics. The Greens tried to block even the export of anti-missile defense systems to Israel during the last Gulf War when Iraq was actually shooting missiles at Israel. The 1933 part comes from their absolutism -- a bane of the German mentality.

In re: Remember, every time you buy a bottle of Evian, a Carlsberg product, a Spanish melon, a Godiva chocolate, a Dior lipstick, a Gucci bag, or a German kitchen appliance, you are financing the next Muslim mass murderer.

These kinds of crudely anti-European arguments are ridiculous and do little to aid the cause. Instead, one pictures fanatics on that side of the dispute. To tell the truth, there is far more hatred of Arabs and Moslems in the U.S. and even in Europe, than anti-Semitism. The Turks in Germany face constant abuse (though in fairness, I must say that German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder's government is evolving far more enlightened policies). Chauvinism is the source and could easily carry over to persecution of other groups, like Jewish people. Chauvinism is wrong on both sides.

As for me, one would naturally suspect that my views are European, but that isn't really true. I of course sense the anti-Semitism that informs a lot of the European perspective. It puts me off, and as you know, I have been rather vociferous about that, sometimes to good effect, I think.

[A university student at the University of Vienna has been inspired by Osborne's article "Artist-Prophets" -- published in Leonardo Music Journal (Vol. 9, 1999) M.I.T. Press -- to do her Master's thesis on the Vienna Philharmonic's collaboration with the Third Reich.]

Actually, my view on the Israeli/Palestnian war is far, far more Berkeley than European. Watch Democracy Now! for a couple weeks and you will see where I am more or less aligned [Hey, it's our favorite news site], though even they sometimes go too far for me. They simply do not give enough credence to the difficulties of dealing with the Muslim mindset.

On the other hand, I will never subscribe to shooting to death rock-throwing children, bulldozing houses, building walls euphemistically called fences, or respecting politicians of hatred like Benjamin Netanyahu or Ariel Sharon. As you know, the assassinated Yitzhak Rabin is much more my type. The current morass shows how hatred breeds hatred and can even wear down a country and people with the noble and humanistic ideals upon which Israel was founded.

I know I will sound like a crackpot, and maybe I am, but I think the United States is mostly responsible. The Israelis are extremely independent-minded people. They have a desire for self-reliance that only the Holocaust and two millennia of being pariahs could produce. If they had any chance at all, they would very rightly keep an independent distance from the U.S. In reality, the populace of Israel is mostly from Europe and its view of government and culture is far more European than American. The U.S. knows this and keeps the Palestinian conflict alive in order to keep Israel totally dependent upon the U.S. I do not think I am being cynical or overly suspicious. Our country is sinister. It has a huge incentive for keeping its hands on the Middle East, and Israel is its fortress in that area.

Well, anyway, there you have it.

Here are some other calls for boycotts against insurance companies, dairy products, hotel resorts, Broadway shows, newspapers, record companies and almost anything else in the market for customers. As Brando once said in "The Wild One" in another context (he was asked what he was rebelling against): "Whaddya got?" I don't know if these other boycott calls are justified. But at a glance most of them seem so.

No pushover, book critic Jonathan Yardley takes the measure of Hunter S. Thompson this way: "Anything he writes is worth reading, even when it radiates serious signs of having been composed under the influence of something rather more hallucinating than office coffee." The occasion is Yardley's review in yesterday's Washington Post of Thompson's latest book, "Hey Rube," a collection of his columns on ESPN.com -- rants, if you will -- often about sports but also about anything that crosses his admirable gonzo mind.

Running through Yardley's review, however, is an undercurrent of astonishment about the obscurity of the Internet. Until he received the book's galley proofs he never knew the online column existed, although Thompson has been writing it for four years and drawing a reported 250,000 readers. In other words, like Yardley, "there are probably about 290 million Americans who haven't a clue that it exists." Thompson has the latitude to write about anything he wants not only because he's "a nice byline," which ESPN can trot out to boost its prestige, Yardley contends, but because "his columns are published "in the relative anonymity of the Internet," which is "an immense vacuum that sucks everything into instant oblivion."

Yardley isn't that far wrong about the Internet. It's good to be reminded of his point of view if only to temper the claims by some enthusiasts who believe the Internet has so thoroughly transformed the cultural landscape that the tipping point of the revolution is already here. Maybe so. But on the evidence I see, it's doubtful.

For example, a pal of mine who writes for CounterPunch complains that the Web site doesn't pay anything. Face it, pal, about a million other sites don't pay anything either. Looking on the bright side, he says he does get "personal PR" out of it, which is useful for flogging his book. But that advantage is in fact as evanescent as the wind. Even a large readership on the Internet is less substantial than it might seem.

When I was a well-paid senior editor at MSNBC.com, I wrote a daily blog called "The Juice." It was not unusual for The Juice to draw 100,000 daily page views. There were times it drew nearly 500,000 in a day. Those are astounding numbers. But what did they mean? That someone came to the blog and spent 30 seconds, a minute, reading it? Or maybe they spent two minutes, an eon in Web time? What kind of impact can that have?

From the metrics I've seen, even the biggest names writing with a sophistication that needs to be savored or takes time to digest are lucky to hold a Web reader's attention for more than 60 seconds. Big sites trumpet their number of "daily page views." You rarely, if ever, see them mention "duration." That's because it's so embarrassing. The limited amount of time spent on a site is one of the Internet's little secrets. Shhh. Try not to tell the advertisers. 

Putting that aside, the democratic aspect of the Internet cuts two ways. Anybody can have a say. But unless it's visible, it often doesn't count. And visibility is determined by size, by the ability to put up a site that dominates the market -- even a "free" market that costs little to enter -- through mainstream promotion, manpower, technical sophistication and so on. When it comes to drawing a large audience, except for the idea that the Internet fosters small groups of like-minded individuals who discover each other and therefore can band together to have influence, the rules that big media have applied to dominate TV and print now apply just as thoroughly, if not more so, in cyberspace.

If you haven't heard that before, you haven't been listening. Yes, in politics and grass-roots activism, the Internet has changed some things: Raising money for candidates, organizing, righteously beating the shit out of backward ideas and institutions -- these have been accomplished.

But making a living on the Internet as an artist or as a critic won't happen for a long, long time -- not unless there are jobs with mainstream outfits. And by mainstream, I mean everything from Slate and Salon, which now keep a relatively few people in groceries, to CNN, CBS, ABC, NBC, The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times and the rest of the establishment, which have relatively understaffed online outlets themselves. Everyone else, all the CounterPunches of the world, just don't have the visibility to make a go of a paying proposition. Until that happens, the notion that the cultural revolution has been cyberized is less than convincing.

Systemic failure, the fondly brandished euphemism for failure to take personal responsibility, came in for more bashing yesterday. This time it was the Bush administration's former weapons inspector David Kay who did the bashing.

In what Philip Shenon reports this morning as "uncharacteristically caustic remarks," Kay pointed out that "until people and organizations are held responsible" at the National Security Council and the Central Intelligence Agency for the "overwhelming failure" of intelligence in Iraq, he can't see how the appointment of a new, overall intelligence czar can correct things.

But even Kay avoided calling out the responsible individuals, key among them Condoleeza Rice. Though he put the blame squarely on her shoulders for misleading the Nincompoop in Chief and his waffling minion, Secretary of State Colin Powell -- nailing the fact that systemic failure is not some kind of faceless enterprise -- he "did not identify Ms. Rice by name."

Kay chose not to despite remarks "clearly aimed at her performance," Shenon writes, and reflecting "a widespread view among intelligence specialists that Ms. Rice, perhaps Mr. Bush's most trusted aide, and the National Security Council have never been held sufficiently accountable for intelligence failures before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and the Iraq war."

This criticism "mirrored that made earlier this year by Richard A. Clarke, Ms. Rice's former top counterterrorism deputy." But Clarke at least named her when he "accused her of paying little attention to dire intelligence threats throughout the spring and summer of 2001 that Al Qaeda was about to strike against the United States."

Meantime, the latest "high-level Army inquiry" into the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, expected to be released next week, according to another report in this morning's New York Times, will point to another instance of systemic failure. Translation (italics mine): "The inquiry found no evidence of direct culpability above the colonel who commanded the military intelligence unit at the prison," officials familiar with the report told the Times.

If it's any consolation to the tortured prisoners, to the seven low-level soldiers who've been charged with abuse, or to Americans who feel dishonored by what happened, the investigation is expected to blame "at least two dozen military intelligence personnel, civilian contractors and [CIA] officers for wrongdoing."

Yet, while the investigation faults the Army for "failing to provide leadership," senior commanders in Baghdad and the top commander himself, Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, as well as senior Pentagon officials, "were found to have had no role in ordering or permitting the abuse." Parse that, if you can. It was the system's fault, not the fault of those running it. Lack of leadership equals exoneration of the leaders. That's where the buck stops. Never mind "Chain of Command: The Road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib." Now I get it.

Postscript: Have a look at the trailer for "Uncovered: The War on Iraq," a new documentary by Robert Greenwald.

Anyone with a brain who has ever worked in a corporate setting can appreciate Corinne Maier's complaints that 1) "corporations are not meritocracies," and 2) "work is organized a little like the court of Louis XIV, very complicated and very ritualized so that people feel they are working effectively when they are not."

Maier's critique of corporate culture, which comes in the form of what reporter Craig S. Smith describes as "a slacker manifesto," is all about working in France. She is French, after all. But what Maier complains about, which is especially visible to people in middle management, applies as well to American companies.

As Smith points out, "with chapters titled 'The Morons Who Are Sitting Next To You' and 'Beautiful Swindles,'" her book "Bonjour Paresse" ("Hello Laziness") "declares that corporate culture is nothing more than the 'crystallization of the stupidity of a group of people at a given moment.'"

In other words, systemic failure is not some kind of faceless enterprise. It is the result of individuals who make wrong decisions, people with names and responsibilities whose collective action ends up as the sort of "groupthink" that the 9/11 Commission has blamed for the failure of the U.S. intelligence community to thwart Al Qaeda's strikes against the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

Corporate employees know that many of these wrong decisions are often taken because those who make them do so out of cowardice, out of the craven need to brown-nose higher-ups. They do not want to be accused of not being team players and risk losing their jobs. They do not want to displease their bosses. So they go along to get along.

It is precisely this sort of behavior that disgusts a senior CIA officer, Michael F. Scheuer, who headed the agency's attempt to track down Osama bin Laden from 1996 to 1999 and who has since written the current best seller "Imperial Hubris" under the pen name Anonymous. In an e-mail sent to the commission (and copied to The New York Times), Scheuer blasts both the CIA and the commission for not holding individuals responsible for the devastating intelligence failures.

Scheuer cites "bureaucratic cowards" and writes that the commission's widely acclaimed final report was extremely disappointing. It "seems to deliberately ignore those who were clearly culpable of negligence or dereliction." He warns that by "finding no one culpable, you will allow the mindset that got America to 9/11 to endure and thrive in whatever new community structure is established."

The Nincompoop in Chief's nomination of Porter Goss to head the CIA confirms Scheuer's point. As does the nincompoop's resistance to creating a new post of overall intelligence chief with authority over the budgets and personnel of all U.S. intelligence agencies, as the 9/11 Commission has urged.

"The intelligence community does not need a feckless czar with fine surroundings and little authority," William H. Webster, who led the C.I.A. during the Reagan and first Bush administrations and is also a former director of the F.B.I., told the commission on Monday. "That is the wrong way to go."

Should it surprise anyone that if it's the wrong way to go, a White House steeped in corporate culture (and supported by Rummy Boy) can be counted on to push for it?

A friend writes:

My own Golan Cipel has kept me in stitches for the last 35 years. Over breakfast he alluded to the Newsweek article on Jim McGreevey, "Gov. McGreevey's affair to forget." He said it should have been subtitled: "The Down Low -- It's Not Just a Black Thing Anymore." [See the Down low blues or J.L. King's "On the Down Low."]

By the way, the first "standing [different strokes] governor" to come out of the closet is not McGreevey, but WAS Lord Cornberry, Governor of East and West Jersey and New York, circa the late 1600s. A major flamer. Used to run around the mansion in drag all day. My late friend, actor Anthony Holland, and playwright Bill Hoffman even wrote a play about him. I saw a staged reading of it at New York's Public Theatre, slightly before the invention of moveable type.

Okay ... if you want to get technical about it, we were STILL the colonies, and Cornberry was never actually IN the closet. But as the young folk say, attention should be paid.

Which says it all.

Except for this from Al Jazeera: Was McGreevey 'sex scandal' an Israeli Intelligence operation?! That theory is the LOL brainchild of Andy Martin, a self-described Republican "good guy" candidate for the U.S. Senate from Florida.

The news that Al Qaeda had cased buildings in New York, Washington and elsewhere -- which was revealed on computer discs taken from an Al Qaeda communications operative who was recently arrested in Pakistan -- brings to mind Alan Cullison's lucky accident in northern Afghanistan almost three years ago.

Perhaps you remember Cullison? He's the Wall Street Journal reporter, currently a Nieman Fellow at Harvard, whose laptop was smashed while he was covering the war against the Taliban. Looking to replace it, he bought a couple of computers for $1,100. His acquisition, as Cullison recounts in the current issue of The Atlantic, "was unique in the experience of journalists covering radical Isalm."

What he purchased was a 40-gigabyte IBM desktop and a Compaq laptop that had been stolen "from al-Qaeda's central office in Kabul on November 12, the night before the city fell to the Northern Alliance." It turned out that the desktop computer "had been used mostly by Ayman al-Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden's top deputy," and "contained nearly a thousand text documents, dating back to 1997."

Cullison and a WSJ colleague, Andrew Higgins, eventually wrote a series of articles for the Journal in 2002 based on those documents, most in Arabic but also in French, Farsi, English and Malay. The result "was an astonishing inside look at the day-to-day world of al-Qaeda, as managed by its top strategic planners -- among them bin Laden, al-Zawahiri, Atef, Ramzi bin al-Shibh, and Khalid Sheikh Muhammad, all of whom were intimately involved in the planning of 9/11, and some of whom (bin Laden and al-Zawahiri) are still at large."

The documents included budgets, training manuals for recruits, and scouting reports for international attacks, and they shed light on everything from personnel matters and petty bureaucratic sniping to theological discussions and debates about the merits of suicide operations. There were also video files, photographs, scanned documents, and Web pages, many of which, it became clear, were part of the group's increasingly sophisticated efforts to conduct a global Internet-based publicity and recruitment effort.

Cullison points out that "one of the most important insights to emerge from the computer is that 9/11 sprang not so much from al-Qaeda's strengths as from its weaknesses." Lack of financial resources -- no links to Iraq were indicated "or to any other deep-pocketed government" (Saudi connections notwithstanding) -- led to "bitter infighting" within Al Qaeda. Strikes against the United States were intended to end "the internal rivalries" and unify the group.

Most interesting, Cullison draws the conclusion that while 9/11 was a tactical victory for Al Qaeda, its top leadership even then was playing a long-range strategic game to bait the United States.

Like the early Russian anarchists who wrote some of the most persuasive tracts on the uses of terror, al-Qaeda understood that its attacks would not lead to a quick collapse of the great powers. Rather, its aim was to tempt the powers to strike back in a way that would create sympathy for the terrorists. Al-Qaeda has so far gained little from the ground war in Afghanistan; the conflict in Iraq, closer to the center of the Arab world, is potentially more fruitful. As Arab resentment against the United States spreads, al-Qaeda may look less like a tightly knit terror group and more like a mass movement. And as the group develops synergy in working with other groups branded by the United States as enemies (in Iraq, the Israeli-occupied territories, Kashmir, the Mindanao Peninsula, and Chechnya, to name a few places), one wonders if the United States is indeed playing the role written for it on the computer.

Cullison supports his observations with more than a dozen examples of the e-mail messages sent to and from Osama Bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri, Mullah Omar (leader of the Taliban), Muhammad Atef, Abu Mosab al-Suri, Abu Khalid al-Suri, Tariq Anwar and unnamed conspirators, and shared by others in the Al Qaeda leadership such as Ramzi bin al-Shibh and Khalid Sheikh Muhammad.

In a television interview on C-SPAN's Washington Journal, Cullison discusses the issues raised by his Atlantic article and answers questions from the public about Al Qaeda. (Scroll down to the program of 8/9.)

When we were gone a couple of weeks ago, America heard about the Nincompoop in Chief's big blooper: "Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we." But it's even weirder seeing him say it. He actually reads that passage from a prepared speech, an indication that his writers aren't too bright either.

Go here to see the video: Scroll down to "New Ways to Harm the Country" and click on "200k." While you're on that page, you can also check out a candid moment when the nincompoop shows his classy side: "Bush Cleans His Glasses." And check out "Bushwacked!" Bet you've never heard him give that State of the Union speech. The Jay Leno Q&As are fun, too.

Finally, if you want to see the Nincompoop in Chief drone haltingly through the entire "New Ways to Harm Our Country" speech, go to the official White House website: Scroll down and click on the video of "President Signs Defense Bill" (Aug. 5, 2004). His delivery is so full of stumbles he barely seems to understands what he's saying. It is, if nothing else, a lesson in how not to give a speech.

In case you haven't seen the nincompoop's nominee to head the CIA telling Michael Moore "I am not qualified," have a look. Porter Goss says: "I don't have the language skills. ... We're looking for Arabists today. I don't have the cultural background probably. And I certainly don't have the technical skills. ... So the things that you need to have, I don't have."

We've heard the claim that he wasn't talking about the job of DCI (Director of Central Intelligence); that he was saying he was not qualified to get any old CIA job. If that's true, however, does that make him more qualified to run the agency? Is the CIA supposed to be like Kenny Boy's Enron, where the chief executive claims to know less than his underlings?

The oldest trick in the book: Deny and lie -- and when the news is bad, change the subject. That's the Nincompoop in Chief's m.o. So sayeth the experts, above all Paul Krugman. "I had a bad feeling about Bush, from an economic standpoint, as far back as the 2000 presidential campaign," he says. "I just felt -– My God, he's lying through his teeth!"

No wonder today's lead editorial in The New York Times, following up yesterday's report in The Washington Post, begins this way: "President Bush reacted decisively to this month's shockingly bad employment report -- by quickly changing the topic to terror."

No wonder the nincompoop's corporate minions say the latest internal Pentagon audit of Halliburton, first reported yesterday by The Wall Street Journal, is "being used for political purposes" even though:

+ The audit found that the company has "failed to adequately account" for roughly half of "the $4.2 billion it has received so far" for contracts to provide "logistical support to troops in Iraq and Kuwait."

+ The audit found that the accounting system of Kellogg Brown & Root, the Halliburton subsidiary working in Iraq, "was inadequate in nearly every way in dealing with the costs of providing food, shelter and other support for the troops" and "gave the military inadequate cost estimates, incomplete and inadequate reviews of those estimates, poor employee training and 'a lack of current, accurate and complete cost and pricing data,' according to the Pentagon."

No wonder "surveys suggest that Bush's popularity has plummeted among 18 to 29 year-olds in the past four months," according to today's Post, and that the latest Washington Post-ABC News poll shows that John Kerry leads the nincompoop "2-1 among registered voters younger than 30."

No wonder the nincompoop claims not to read newspapers. Otherwise he'd read about another incredible screw-up, reported in today's Los Angeles Times: "Stretched thin by troop deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan and security needs at home, the Army has resorted to hiring private security guards to help protect dozens of American military bases."

Where do these guards (4,300 of them) come from? "Four firms -- two of which got the contracts without having to bid competitively" and "with little previous security experience." And how much are the contracts worth? "As much as $1.24 billion."

No wonder "In Iraq, Strategic Failures" -- as the headline puts it on today's column by Jim Hoagland -- reflect the willingness of the nincompoop's administration "to engage in or condone cynical maneuvering designed not to create democracy in Baghdad but to create political cover at home and fear and turmoil in Tehran."

No wonder the rise in oil prices, described as "a perfect storm," means bad weather for all of us. It has become "an issue in President Bush's reelection. The U.S. Federal Reserve on Tuesday blamed the run-up in oil prices for the recent sharp slowdown in the economy."

And no wonder, in today's pièce de résistance, Dahlia Lithwick writes: "So it has come down to this: You are at liberty to exercise your First Amendment right to assemble and to protest, so long as you do so from behind chain-link fences and razor wire, or miles from the audience you seek to address."

Reflecting on the cordoned-off "free-speech zone" at the Democrat Convention in Boston, and as New York City prepares for the Republican Convention amid turmoil over Mayor Michael Bloomberg's decision to block huge protests in Central Park, Lithwick points out that there is no "meaningful link between domestic political protest and terrorism ... except in the eyes of the Bush administration, which conflates the two both as a matter of law and of policy."

It started with Attorney General John Ashcroft's declaration, shortly after 9/11: "To those who scare peace-loving people with phantoms of lost liberty, my message is this: Your tactics only aid terrorists." This was an early attempt to couple disagreeing on civil liberties with abetting terrorists.

No wonder just one day's minor haul of news and opinion makes you fear for the nation.

Is James Atlas really "an overwrought hysteric," as I called him yesterday, because of his hand-wringing essay, "The Fear This Time," about life in post-9/11 New York? Well, I still think of him as an Upper West Side weenie.

But this morning New York Times op-ed columnist Nicholas Kristof writes that "a 10-kiloton nuclear weapon" exploding in Times Square would "vaporize or destroy" Madison Square Garden, the Empire state Building, Grand Central Terminal and Carnegie Hall, would "partly destroy" the United Nations building and much of midtown Manhattan, and would kill about 500,000 people.

"Could this happen?" Kristof asks, and answers: "Unfortunately, it could -- and many experts believe that such an attack, somewhere, is likely." He cites a "terrifying new book" -- Harvard professor Graham Allison's "Nuclear Terrorism: The Ultimate Preventable Catastrophe" -- as the source of that Times Square scenario. He points out further that Allison "did not pluck it from thin air" but rather from White House aides. Exactly one month after 9/11, they "told President Bush that a C.I.A. source code-named Dragonfire had reported that Al Qaeda had obtained a 10-kiloton nuclear weapon and smuggled it into New York City."

The C.I.A. found the report plausible. ... President Bush dispatched nuclear experts to New York to search for the weapon and sent Dick Cheney and other officials out of town to ensure the continuity of government in case a weapon exploded in Washington instead. But to avoid panic, the White House told no one in New York City, not even Mayor Rudy Giuliani.

It isn't until the eighth paragraph, halfway through his column, that Kristof lets us know: "Dragonfire's report was wrong." (The italics are mine.) Not that there haven't been other "similar reports" -- as yet unconfirmed -- that Al Qaeda has gotten hold of a nuclear weapon from the former Soviet Union. So maybe when Atlas writes that "living in New York is like a terminal disease" waiting for another disaster much worse than 9/11 to happen, he's not just an Upper West Side weenie echoing cocktail party chatter in purple prose.

If it's any reassurance, Atlas should feel more secure knowing that God is looking after us -- at least according to Gary Walby. At a Bush rally in Florida yesterday, the Times reported, Walby "told the president during a question-and-answer session that though he always voted Republican, 'this is the very first time I felt God was in the White House.'"

In case we forgot to mention this from today's Washington Post:

The economy has 1.1 million fewer jobs than the day Bush took office, making it more than likely he will join Herbert Hoover as the second president to see the nation suffer a net job loss on his watch. The economy is 7 million jobs short of the level the White House had predicted when trying to sell the tax cuts. And a 10-year budget outlook that in 2001 projected $5.6 trillion in surpluses now foresees $2.7 trillion in deficits, an unprecedented fiscal swing.

The Post reports that "rather than acknowledging failure" for his tax policy, our Nincompoop in Chief is expected to continue repeating the same old mantra he's been offering in his campaign, most recently on Monday from the Oval Office: "The economy is strong, and it's getting better."

If he needs a different mantra, Straight Up poet laureate Leon Freilich has one for him. How about this?

NEW AXIS OF TAXES

NICEVILLE, Fla. (Reuters) - President Bush said on Tuesday that abolishing the U.S. income tax system and replacing it with a national sales tax was an idea worth considering. [Aug. 11, 2004]

Even nicer, the tax
Would have a progressive bent--
Nine or ten for the poor,
For the rich, one percent.

Now that our Nincompoop in Chief has nominated a new Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) to head the Central Intelligence Agency, here are some words of wisdom from a trustworthy mathematician friend who does top-secret work for the Department of Defense and the American military:

"Stan Turner's comments on the 9/11 report are worth reading. The following excerpt is (in my view) a persuasive argument for a Cabinet-level National Intelligence Director (NID)":

A serious problem today, which the commission addresses nicely, is that the 1947 law did not give the DCI sufficient authority to ensure adequate exchange of data among the agencies. It would take only an executive order from the president to give the DCI, or a new NID, the authority to set the standards for classifying secret intelligence materials. Today, each of the heads of the 15 agencies can create classification categories so as to exclude other agencies from their data. Some intelligence does deserve special treatment. But that should be decided by the NID/DCI, who has the national interest in view, not someone with an agency's perspective.

Turner, a former head of the CIA, doesn't specifically address whether a new intelligence director should have a Cabinet-level appointment. He does say, however, that "a close relationship with the president is a NID/DCI's lifeblood."

Another former head of the CIA, John Deutch, says that a cabinet-level appointment for a new national intelligence director "is no substitute for properly aligning authority with responsibility."

White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card has said the chairmen of the 9/11 commission told him that they did not mean they wanted a new intelligence czar to be a member of the Cabinet. "They recommended that it be Cabinet-level pay," CNN quotes him as saying.

In any case, our Nincompoop in Chief has already made it clear he has no intention of making a Cabinet-level appointment. "Bush's NID is strictly advisory in nature, with no Cabinet slot, no office in the West Wing, no authority over priorities, personnel, or budgets," Fred Kaplan has pointed out in Slate. "It's worse than useless; whoever takes the job can expect nothing more than glorified paper-pushing." But given the nincompoop's U-turns on just about every major decision he's made so far, that may not be the last word.

James Atlas writes "The Fear This Time" in the current New York magazine. I suppose the title is intended to bring to mind James Baldwin's "The Fire Next Time," which is already a sign of overreaching and totally inappropriate. The piece itself reads likes an overwritten essay by an overwrought hysteric. Atlas leaves no doubt of that with his hand-wringing.

Living in New York is like a terminal disease: You start awake in panic every morning, your stomach knotted, your heart plunging in your chest. But as the day wears on, you're not even aware that you're going about your life. An event that will surely qualify as one of the most astounding in the whole of recorded history has occurred not a mile from you. It's as if you just happened to be a shepherd tending your flock near Pompeii when Mount Vesuvius erupted, or a seventeenth-century London publican glancing out the window of his establishment in the Strand to glimpse the flames consuming London. That two hijacked, passenger-loaded commercial jetliners should plunge into the World Trade Center and topple it to the ground, reducing almost 3,000 innocent civilians to ash, was beyond imagination -- but I still have to drop off the dry cleaning and go to the bank.

Compare that with Baldwin. The difference in the quality of the writing, to say nothing of the sentiment, is like night and day.

I do not mean to be sentimental about suffering -- enough is certainly as good as a feast -- but people who cannot suffer can never grow up, can never discover who they are. That man who is forced each day to snatch his manhood, his identity, out of the fire of human cruelty that rages to destroy it knows, if he survives his effort, and even if he does not survive it, something about himself and human life that no school on earth -- and, indeed, no church -- can teach. He achieves his own authority, and that is unshakeable.

At least the magazine also offers John Leonard on two documentaries about reality -- "Death in Gaza" and "The President Versus David Hicks" -- without the Upper West Side seepage.

Glad I went to the sold-out Bob Dylan / Willie Nelson gig Friday night at Doubleday Field in Cooperstown, N.Y., where they launched their summer tour of minor league ballparks before a crowd of about 12,000 fans.

Loved the Hot Club of Cowtown, the opening act. Hot Club plays western swing  -- lots of their own original songs and jazz standards. I've got a crush on Elana Fremerman's voice, not to mention her fiddling. You won't find a better musician than Fremerman, a Kansas native who started out playing classical violin and viola. And try finding a guitarist as fine as the Hot Club virtuoso Whit Smith (from Connecticut, of all places) or someone who slaps a bass as well as Jake Erwin, their crack bassist (another Kansas native).

Full disclosure: A friend of mine, Joe Kerr, plays piano on couple of their recordings, including their recent "Ghost Train." Here's a sample. And here's another opinion.

Especially enjoyed Willie's 45-minute set. He opened with "Whiskey River" and closed with "Texas Flood." I was looking forward to hearing Dylan, too, but after the fourth or fifth number, his set sounded like pure aggression. It became monotonous, too. Everybody else seemed to love his performance.

The crowd was peaceful, though it moved toward the stage like a tidal wave when Dylan came on, trampling blankets that people had laid out. There was no point in sitting. To catch a glimpse of Dylan's regal doings onstage, everyone was forced to stand shoulder to shoulder and crane their necks for more than an hour and a half.

Dylan played keyboard, which you couldn't hear over the wall of sound from the huge drum kit and the wailing electric guitars. Dylan didn't sing, of course; he growled into the mike. I liked his growl, but naturally the words were unintelligible. When he played harmonica, the others piped down a bit so you could hear him. Even so, there was no way his tooting could hold up against all that electrified screed. The harmonica sounded feeble.

Also, except for the rhythm changes from tune to tune, you almost couldn't tell one song from another. (Well, I couldn't.) And some of them sounded exactly alike. Dylan seemed so remote, frankly, the crowd might as well have been cheering a pharoah.

Leon Freilich, Straight Up's Calvin Trillin, takes note of high-end (valued-added?) commentary in the celebrity circus:

CULTURAL DISH

"More recently [Susan] Sontag has been the lover of the Vanity Fair photographer Annie Leibovitz." -- From "Odd Couple" by David Thomson, The Atlantic | July/August 2004

Isn't it frightfully, wonderfully antic
To find gossip in The Atlantic?
As Aldous Huxley said of groins,
"Show me high brows, I'll show you loins."

Mr. Herman,

I think one of us misunderstood what David Brooks was saying in his commentary about John Kerry's speech.

I thought [Brooks] was saying that the Democratic Party has traditionally been the party for mommies -- i.e. it has appealled more strongly to women -- while the Republican Party has positioned itself to appeal more to daddies, i.e. men. His point as I took it was that Kerry was trying to appear strong on defense and other such "manly" concerns, and the party made almost no mention the entire convention of traditionally women-focused issues like abortion, pay equity, etc., because Kerry was making an overt play for male voters. Brooks even stated that Kerry was taking a page from Bush's 2000 campaign, when his "compassionate conservative" crap won over many female voters. (Idiots!) But, of course, Kerry is doing it in reverse, trying to appear "strong" (as if championing women's issues makes one look weak -- ugh!) and less compassionate to appeal to men.

With all of that in mind, I didn't take [Brooks's] meaning to be that the nation is an infant. Rather that men with kids have certain concerns that tend to lead them to vote Republican, and women with kids tend to care about the same issues as the Democrats. Using this interpretation, I didn't think it was such a dumb comment. In fact, I thought he correctly identified one of the main goals of Kerry's speech; moreover, I think it's probably a pretty good strategy to get Kerry elected. At least I hope it is!

Thoughtfully yours,

Kriston Eller