Sometimes when I read Andrew Sullivan I wonder what they actually teach in the political science department (I'm sorry, I mean “Kennedy School of Government”) at Harvard. This item provides yet another example:

BORN-AGAIN DIVORCE: A new survey finds that born-again Christians are just as likely to get divorced as everyone else; and, in some instances, seem to have a higher rate of divorce than others. Jesus, of course, was explicit in his condemnation of divorce (unlike homosexuality). A large majority of born-again Christians disagree. Just don’t call them cafeteria Christians. They have their focus on the real threat to marriage: those who have always been barred from marrying.

I do hope Sullivan is aware that born-again Christians (however defined; the survey linked by Sullivan uses a question format that probably would inflate the number of “born-agains” versus the normal approach of asking the respondents whether they consider themselves “born-again Christians”) come in many political stripes, and many of them (including probably a higher proportion of those who are divorced, who would tend to be more liberal) support same-sex marriage. But why let the facts get in the way of a good smear against Protestants?

Ironically, of course, those who tend to agree with Sullivan in his Quixotic crusade to restore covenant marriage as the law of the land are also the least likely to approve of same-sex marriage, Sullivan’s protestations that favoring gay marriage is actually a “true conservative” position notwithstanding.

Update: This page may help explain the title of this post.

Another Update: Conrad of The Gweilo Diaries also has quibbles with Sullivan’s fixations as of late.

Colby Cosh nominates a post by Evan Kirchhoff, no Bush fan, as “Best Thing Written On The Subject” of Ra^therGate. I tend to agree; go read the whole thing, as it’s absolutely merciless throughout. Meanwhile, Susanna Cornett dismisses the idea of Republican dirty tricks, apparently the “out” CBS is going to use for this scandal, as being rather (pardon the pun) lame:

As for the Republicans engineering it… please! Doesn’t CBS realize how thoroughly pathetic and childish that makes them sound? First, it’s very clear that the documents wouldn’t pass serious scrutiny at any time, so even if the Republicans did engineer it, I don’t think even they would have assumed CBS would actually take them seriously! They would have credited CBS with more intelligence, which would have obviously been a flagrant error. Second, if the Republicans were to have engineered this, they would have done a much better job of it. Finally, and actually most importantly, despite the efforts of the MSM to convey the opposite impression, I don’t think the Republicans play that dirty (at least in that arena).

Evan Kirchhoff also has some free advice for his fellow Democrats:

I’ll let you in on a secret: until the recent memo fiesta, I was 100% certain that Bush was AWOL in some sense from something at some point in Texas, since I vaguely remember this going around once or twice before (insert typical rumor about alternative service with Captain J. Daniels, if you know what I mean). Thanks to the CBS/DNC revisitation of the issue, I have boringly learned that there was some kind of flex-time system that operated with an annual “points” scale, and apparently (as I understand this) if you look at Bush’s attendance points, they line up adequately. So now I’m apathetic about AWOL at both the regular and the meta-level.

Currently there are about 7 weeks remaining until the election. If you like, you can spend another two or three of them trying to reverse this conclusion, and if you dig hard enough you might discover that Bill Gates has a time machine he hasn’t previously disclosed to shareholders. But I really think you ought to consider the pure opportunity cost of that project, because with the month nearly half over, it’s starting to look like the entire campaign plan for September consisted of a handful of pseudo-kerned .doc files and Kitty Kelley’s Bush the Coke-Huffing Monkey.

While they’re at it, the DNC might also want to look into finding some campaign workers who actually know what John Kerry stands for. Now, granted, that’s perhaps difficult given Kerry’s own Heisenbergian tendencies, but at least some minor effort on that front would be nice.

I just downloaded Mozilla Firefox 1.0 PR, and like BigJim I’m liking the new Live Bookmarks feature immensely—it reminds me a bit of the approach David Janes took with BlogMatrix Jäger, but the Mozilla approach is significantly less featureful (for starters, I can’t see any way to go to the root URL specified by a feed, and it doesn’t keep track of what you’ve read in any way that I can tell; nor does there seem to be a way to add a RSS feed without a LINK element—so I can’t add the Chronicle of Higher Ed feeds). On the other hand, it’s integrated in the browser nicely, and you can put a folder of feeds in your Bookmarks Toolbar, and use the menu to surf posts seamlessly (so it doesn’t take up real estate when you’re reading), or you can open the “Live Bookmarks” in the sidebar. And it does have Atom support, which is nice. So, for now, I’ll give it 3 out of 5 stars.

In other changes, it looks like Gtk theming has changed slightly yet again, and apparently the “disappearing cookie” bug has been somewhat, but not totally, squished. And it does seem a little more zippy than 0.9.3 did on my Linux box (though that could just be due to the Mozilla.org builds being i686 builds, as opposed to Debian policy-compliant i386 builds). So it seems like a worthwhile upgrade.

You know, I really think BigJim should get out of the way of this one.

Steven Jens is perplexed but fixated by some John Kerry campaign-trail humor. I’m reminded of Lewis Black’s riff on “The White Album” about things overheard at IHOP, all of which revolves around the following statement:

If it weren’t for my horse, I wouldn’t have spent that year in college.

Be careful with that one; if you aren’t, your brain will do what happened to all those computers that Kirk was required to outwit between gratuitous fight scenes on the original series of Star Trek.

Amy Zeigart writes that the Department of Homeland Security is little more than a giant pork-barrel scheme. Who on earth could have predicted that outcome? I’m shocked and appalled. (þ Dan Drezner)

Gary Farber quite rightly points out a double-standard in the Bush administration’s treatment of terrorists who target a certain unfriendly country.

It’s official: there’s a QB controversy in Oxford. I think I’d give Spurlock the nod at least starting against perennial SEC punching bag Vanderbilt, but I don’t think I’d give him more than three drives to get his act together. I’m not sure Flatt is much of an upgrade, but he did manage to accomplish something against Alabama, which is more than Spurlock can say. (The question mark in all of this is blue-chip recruit Robert Lane out of Louisiana, currently #3 on the depth chart but poised to move up if this turns into a “rebuilding season” after the trip to Wyoming.)

One thing’s for sure: Rebel fans should get their EV1.COM Bowl tickets early!

I could have sworn I linked Michael Totten last night. Grr… Michael Munger has thoughts in a similar vein today, although I think the more likely explanation (here comes Occam again) is that some deranged, historically clueless anti-Bush person produced the documents—and they’d have gone nowhere if 60 Minutes had done anything approaching due diligence. To believe that anyone planted the documents to discredit the AWOL charges (something that I find nearly impossible to believe could be done, given the other uncertainties in Bush’s records during the era anyway) requires the following assumptions on the part of the forger:

• The person who gave the documents to CBS could never be traced back to the forger (i.e. Bush operatives).
• Someone (CBS) would believe the documents were genuine at first glance, despite all the anachronistic features of the documents.
• CBS would not consult any experts in document authenticity, or even if they did, the experts would be too stupid (or too in hock to CBS) to figure out the documents were anachronistic.
• Other people, with fewer resources than CBS, would figure out the documents were fake.

The first three steps require some sort of Jedi mind control on the part of (presumably) Karl Rove, which is a completely idiotic belief on the basis of Lawrence’s Rule (if nothing else).

Anyway, I think the truth about Bush’s National Guard assignment—and the truth about a lot of things that go on in elite politics and in the South—is embodied in this statement by Virginia Postrel:

I also think that Bush got special treatment, probably without anyone having to ask for it. Given his family's connections and the way Texas operates like a small town, people would have looked out for him.

I made a similar point about Clinton during all of his scandals: he didn’t “suborn perjury” from his supporters—they’d have lied for him without his asking, or his (or anyone else’s) needing to ask. There are limits; this sort of thing wouldn’t happen if you killed someone in cold blood, for example,* but it’s a cornerstone of small-town dynamics that many fail to appreciate.

Dean Esmay is right; anyone speculating in public over the identity of the “memo forger” without evidence is (a) an idiot and more importantly (b) doing the exact same crap CBS pulled in the first place—making charges based on stuff that could just be made up. Sheesh. (þ OTB)

David Adesnik of OxBlog makes a rather curious statement in a parenthetical aside in his discussion of Dick Cheney’s charge that John Kerry isn’t serious about the War on Terror:

… Cheney did come perilously close to attacking John Kerry’s patriotism.

It strikes me that Cheney attacked (perhaps somewhat unfairly) John Kerry’s alleged position on the relative merits of the use of military force versus other techniques for dealing with al-Qaeda and other international terror organizations. That seems like an attack on Kerry’s competence, or his worldview, or (if you don’t believe the statement David quotes from Kerry) his sincerity—but I’m not sure at all that it’s an attack on Kerry’s patriotism. Indeed, this account of the January 29, 2004, debate among Democratic presidential hopefuls in Greenville, S.C., has Kerry stating, in response to a question from Tom Brokaw:

The war on terror is less-it is occasionally military, and it will be, and it will continue to be for a long time, and we will need the best trained and the most well equipped and the most capable military, such as we have today.

But it’s primarily an intelligence and law enforcement operation that requires cooperation around the world, the very thing this administration is worst at. I will renew our alliances. I will rejoin the community of nations. I will build the kind of cooperative effort that we need in order to be able to win and, most importantly, the war on terror is also an engagement in the Middle East economically, socially, culturally, in a way that we haven’t embraced because otherwise we’re inviting the clash of civilizations, and I think this administration’s arrogant and ideological policy is taking America down a more dangerous path. I will make America safer than they are.

Is that statement congruent with Cheney’s (implied) charge that Kerry shares “the pre-9/11 mind-set, if you will, that in fact these terrorist attacks are just criminal acts and that we are not really at war”? It’s certainly closer to that viewpoint than Kerry’s DNC speech.

Calling Cheney’s statement “un-American,” as John Edwards did, would be an attack on someone’s patriotism, as would hypothetical statements such as “John Kerry hates America,” “John Kerry wants the terrorists to win,” or “John Kerry materially aided the North Vietnamese regime against the United States in the early 1970s.” Of course, Cheney made none of these statements or expressed similar sentiments, so I’m a bit mystified as to how what he did say constitutes an attack on Kerry’s patriotism.

Speaking just for myself, I don’t question Kerry’s patriotism—I think he genuinely believes that the policies that he and his fellow Democrats espouse are the ones that are best for America—but I think there are legitimate questions to be raised about whether Kerry’s proposals for greater international cooperation are simply papering over pathological problems with the transatlantic alliance (incidentally, Stephen Bainbridge has penned an interesting take on the future role of the United States as the leader of the international system).

Two of the three “local” ads during half-time of the Giants-Eagles game here in Jackson featured Eli Manning (including a cringe-inducing ad for BankPlus that also had Archie in it).

My thoughts on the 0–2 performance of the Ole Miss Rebels (originally posted here):

I think Cutcliffe has a four-year contract that was renewed over the summer (the state government doesn’t permit contracts for more than four years). No idea what the buy-out is.

That said, Cut will have to really screw up—i.e. get nailed by the NCAA or not be bowl-eligible for two straight seasons—to be fired. Realistically, Ole Miss is a 7 or 8-win program on average, and he’s never done worse than seven wins. I can see the coordinator (Latina) getting the boot, or even a Tuberville-style mass slaughter of the coaching staff, but not during the season. Plus, I think the prestige bump from last year’s 10–3 season won’t translate on the field until 2005 when this year’s recruits are off the scout team.

Besides, who are you going to bring in to rebuild? Petrino has a better shot at a BCS bowl in Louisville (once they enter the Big East) than he would ever have in Oxford. More than likely you’d have to bring in someone for a first head-coaching job (cherry-pick someone off Saban’s staff at LSU, for example), and there’s no guarantee that will work better than Cutcliffe.

I think a lot of what we’re seeing is the result of Cutcliffe not playing Spurlock enough last season—I don’t think Spurlock saw a single snap in an SEC game until Saturday—and some of it is growing pains with working with what Spurlock’s strengths are. Flatt, who does a lot of the same stuff Manning did (not to mention having another half-foot on Spurlock), is actually a better fit in the playcalling “package.”

One thing’s for sure: Spurlock’s leash is pretty short by now, and if the Rebels aren’t pounding Vanderbilt by halftime this coming week, he may never see the field again in an Ole Miss uniform.

The last part is probably hyperbole, but if Spurlock can’t figure out how to settle down and complete passes in a game, he’s not going to be on the field much.

In comments at The Captain’s Quarters, “Judge Crater” writes:

There seems to be no amount of time that is too small (at least in New Jersey) to invoke the “Torricelli Option”.
With the RNC so late, Bush had problems as it was in Illinois. I can’t imagine trying to pull the “Torricelli Option” off in 50 states.

To effectively replace a presidential candidate, you don’t have to exercise the “Torricelli Option”; all that has to happen is the Democratic electors have to agree to support a single candidate when the Electoral College meets in December. A few electors might run foul of “faithless elector” laws if they supported someone other than Kerry, but (to my knowledge) nobody has ever been seriously punished for violating them—and, besides, the deed will have been done, as there’s no way to revoke the vote of a faithless elector.

Besides which, the odds of this happening are about zero; even if Kerry melts down due to blowback from Rathergate (a prospect that’s dubious at best, unless it turns out some higher-up in the campaign typed the memos himself), it’s hard to believe any Democrat consensus candidate could emerge other than Edwards, who’s already on record as lending credence to the memos.

Steven Teles and Philip Klinkner have an interesting debate that’s worth a read on the proper role for ideology in the classroom: parts 1, 2, and 3 (so far). I tend to agree with Teles that the wrong approach is to follow the David Horowitz-style “anti-discrimination paradigm,” although I suspect Horowitz has adopted it not to truly encourage its use on matters of political and ideological diversity but to shame academics into abandoning its use on matters of racial and gender diversity.

Bruce Rolston notes that all four memos raising questions about George W. Bush’s service reproduce exactly in Microsoft Word (þ Colby Cosh). As he says, one could buy one memo looking exactly like a Word document on the basis of coincidence… but four? That seems pretty implausible to me, at least.

What about the Selectric Composer—could Killian have used it? That’s not very likely either. And, you too can be a handwriting expert for the day. (Both links to Jeff Harrell’s The Shape of Days.)

Update: Surely if CBS lies to its interview subjects they would’t also lie to the American people, would they? And surely CBS would tell us if the guy allegedly pressuring Killian had retired 18 months before the memo was allegedly written? Right? Bueller?

Ouch:

A senior CBS official, who asked not to be named because CBS managers did not want to go beyond their official statement, named one of the network's sources as retired Maj. Gen. Bobby W. Hodges, the immediate superior of the documents' alleged author, Lt. Col. Jerry B. Killian. He said a CBS reporter read the documents to Hodges over the phone and Hodges replied that "these are the things that Killian had expressed to me at the time."

"These documents represent what Killian not only was putting in memoranda, but was telling other people," the CBS News official said. "Journalistically, we've gone several extra miles."

The official said the network regarded Hodges's comments as "the trump card" on the question of authenticity, as he is a Republican who acknowledged that he did not want to hurt Bush. Hodges, who declined to grant an on-camera interview to CBS, did not respond to messages left on his home answering machine in Texas.

So the “trump card,” Hodges, didn’t actually verify the documents’ authenticity (and CBS went out of its way to tell him the memos were in Killian’s handwriting), and Staudt was apparently only able to influence the Guard in 1973 via telepathy.

I suppose the good news is they didn't rig anything to explode (yet). And it's not like 60 Minutes has a record of basing stories on fake memos or anything:

In 1999, "60 Minutes" apologized, as part of a legal settlement with a Customs Service official, for reporting on a memo that was later found to be fake."

Oh, scratch that one then.

Dean Esmay wants to know if John Kerry has sat down for an interview with a journalist (Jon Stewart doesn’t count) since August 8th. I’m sure he’d appreciate any leads.

I’m not sure that represents “ducking the press” so much as a recognition of the increasingly marginal role that political journalists have in campaigns; why sit down with Russert or Brokaw if you can talk without a filter on the stump (receiving national coverage) and let surrogates handle the spin and the bad PR?

Like James Joyner, I have some more GMail invites to give away. Email me (lordsutch@gmail.com) for yours.

I get this odd feeling that if I were a committed Christian I’d be offended by lectures from non-Christians about my beliefs and the implication that my religious faith compelled me to support a particular party’s policies. Jesus may not have favored private property (or, rather, said the path to salvation was not through having worldly possessions, which isn’t exactly the same thing—having stuff was essentially orthogonal to salvation, although coveting more stuff was a distraction from that path), but I don’t remember anything in the Gospels about God’s will requiring the establishment of European-style welfare states either.

I think Alex Knapp has a winner:

I’ve got no dog in this fight. As I’ve said before, I don’t think Bush or Kerry would be qualified to make sure that I got my fries with my drive-thru order. I don’t know who I’m going to vote for, and honestly I don’t really care. (Given that last time I looked, Bush had a 18-point or so lead in my state, it doesn’t much matter, either.)

But I will say this: the Kerry campaign over the past six weeks or so has shown the potential to wreck the Democratic party. This is what happens when the rallying cry is “Anybody But Bush” (a sentiment that I sympathize with) without much concern as to whether you’re actually electing someone better than Bush. In the race to find someone “electable,” the Democrats ended up with someone who really isn’t. And if Kerry loses, I fear that the result might be a substantially weakened Democratic Party as infighting among groups takes hold. The resulting fallout might be a decade or two more of Republican dominance over the government. I don’t want that. I want two competitive parties constantly battling for dominance. I want divided government, and I want it all the time.

I think the fundamental problem the Democrats have is that “Anybody But Bush” isn’t anybody; it’s John Kerry, a man with no meaningful record in politics to speak of that is unconnected with Southeast Asia, and who can’t figure out what the hell he wants to do when he’s elected—or at least can’t communicate that plan to the public in any sense other than “I’m not going to do what Bush does,” which is fine for the 35% of voters who will support literally “anybody” but Bush but hasn’t done a darn thing to impress the rest.

Not that being the “Anybody But Kerry” candidate does much for Bush, mind you, but at least Bush has something approaching a record—even if a lot of it is a series of complete cock-ups. What Bush does have on his side is the credible fear that turning over the country to John Kerry is a vote for capitulation on virtually all fronts—Iraq, Afghanistan, Sudan, North Korea, Iran, and Kyoto—to the more learned views of our European “allies” (on which they bat 0–6 in terms of having the right ideas) and a recipe to cripple our economy with the sort of massive entitlement programs that have France and Germany circling the drain. All Kerry has going for him, from the libertarian-leaning conservative perspective, is the possibility that divided government might lead to more fiscal conservatism and a more socially liberal Supreme Court (although the latter institution seems to be at a pretty sane point already, if you ask me).

It’s not just Alex saying this, mind you; there’s more on the same theme from von of Obsidian Wings and Hei Lun of Begging to Differ.

Henry Farrell is hosting an interesting discussion of this Gary King and Kosuke Imai piece in Perspectives on Politics (who knew that journal was worth reading?) on the Florida recount in 2000. My general viewpoint is that, as an academic exercise, examining the recount is interesting, but I’d rather see people try to fix the broken voting technology than engage in recriminations over the highly politicized process followed by both major parties during the recount.

Then again, I’m on record as saying I really don’t care that much about politics, so you’d probably expect such a reaction from me.

I think this whole “forged documents” thing is taking off.

Meanwhile, Occam’s Razor suggests that the theory that the documents might not be forged (discussed by Gary Farber) is unlikely. I find it difficult to believe that by coincidence, someone would produce a document with a 1973 typewriter that would look essentially identical to the output of the copy of Microsoft Word 2002 on my desk, down to the inter-letter spacing [not the kerning - Ed.], superscripting of the ordinal “th,” and margins, or that someone would go to the trouble of purchasing a non-standard typewriter ball for a military-issue typewriter (were these golfballs even in the GSA contract with IBM?) and install it just to write memos about a particular officer for filing—but switch back to the standard one for other correspondence. (But Gary is to be commended for at least taking the time to seriously think about this, something a lot of people haven’t done.)

I think Colby Cosh nails it in a sentence:

If the reports are accurate, CBS—estimated annual news budget: one squillion dollars—has been taken in by a fraud that, roughly speaking, anybody over the age of 30 in the industrialized world could have spotted.

Of course, I strongly suspect the people doing the real legwork on this story either (a) are like my students and don’t remember an era before ubiquitous computing or (b) are folks like Dan Rather who haven’t touched a typewriter in 30 years. Speaking of Dan, CBS News is saying we don’t need no—investigation. That stand, er, does not seem wise.

The Majors shut out the Mississippi College Choctaws last night, nine to nothing. It wasn’t an offensive showcase by any means, but the important thing was that it was football!

David Janes passes along word that some folks in British Columbia are planning a monument commemorating draft dodgers. Now I’ve seen everything. David responds:

How about a counter-memorial for all black and poor kids who died in their place?

Au contraire. Such daring heroism as making the mad dash across the Ambassador Bridge in the dark of night or through the shadow of the Peace Arch in broad daylight is clearly worthy of commemoration; I mean, it was just like crossing the Berlin Wall.

Nick Troester was outed as a blogger by his department chair. That’s gotta hurt.

On the other hand, I guess blogging is no longer cool when department chairs start doing it…