Andrew Sullivan’s return to the Daily Dish also marks a return to his cataloguing of conservatives who have shown the slightest bit of discomfort about a federal marriage amendment. Me, I’d wait until the test case for the federal Defense of Marriage Act—passed with Bill Clinton’s signature, no doubt because he expected it to be ruled unconstitutional (shades of Bush’s idiotic stance on McCain-Feingold)—makes it to the Supremes, because I’m pretty sure the second it dies 5–4 on equal protection grounds pretty much every conservative Sullivan counts as an ally on the FMA will suddenly rethink his or her position.

I sometimes wonder if Haaretz and the Jerusalem Post actually report news from the same country.

Like Martin Devon of Patio Pundit, I just wasted half an hour of my life in a hotel room watching Wesley Clark on MSNBC’s Hardball. Martin writes:

I’m listening to Wes Clark on Hardball… and he makes Howard Dean look good. Say what you will about but Dean but he says what he means and he means what he says. With Wes Clark you get the sense that he’s just making shit up. Right now he’s talking about how he would have caught Osama by now, and how he wouldn’t have gone into Iraq. As most of you know, Clark’s early pronouncements weren’t nearly so clear. I’m sorry—he just sounds like an opportunist.

I’ve never been a big Wes Clark fan, even back when I thought that he was a Republican. You know how Dems knock Joe Lieberman as “Bush-lite“? Clark is “Dean-lite.” I don’t see why Clark as any more electable than Dean. Clark has military experience, but that isn’t as good as Dean’s experience as a governor. And Clark is so darn whiny—fingernails on chalkboard.

I particularly enjoyed the moment where Clark, in response to a question from Matthews about what sanction would have been appropriate for Bill Clinton (who quite clearly committed perjury, even if there’s a legitimate argument, that I’m not unsympathetic to, that he never should have been in a situation where he would commit it), launched into a two-minute stump speech that was completely nonresponsive to the question.

Also amusing was Clark’s analysis of the policy formation process of the Bush administration, which seemed to be cribbed directly from a Paul Krugman column (although spiced up with numerous references to nebulous “sources” that Clark is apparently privy to). And I’d love to hear how Clark would have caught Osama bin Laden by now; something tells me he wouldn’t have been hanging out with the Special Ops guys doing the dirty work in the theatre, and the 4th Infantry isn’t interchangeable with the Green Berets—so even if most of the army were stateside instead of patrolling Iraq, I doubt it would make much difference.

Clark also kept going on about his foreign policy gravitas relative to that of George W. Bush; said gravitas was apparently based on (a) being in Europe when the Europeans were rolling their eyes at the Lewinsky scandal and (b) obeying the orders of his civilian masters who had gravitas of their own. I say “apparently,” because he assumed the audience would believe he had foreign policy gravitas on the basis of alleging it alone.

I have to agree with Martin—Clark is “Dean Lite.” Crank up the toaster oven on this guy…

James Joyner notes the existence of something called the “ClarkBot”, the author of which encourages Clark Dittoheads to engage in something called “rapid response.” No doubt Bush and Dean variants aren’t far behind…

John Fund argues in his OpinionJournal Political Diary column today that James Carville and Terry McAuliffe created Howard Dean’s candidacy—a phenomenon already noted this week by The New York Times, as I discussed here. Then again, if you didn’t see it in the Times—which probably describes most Wall Street Journal readers—it’s new to you! Fund gets into the mechanics:

[Moving the Iowa and New Hampshire contests to January] meant holiday-distracted voters would have only a few weeks to pay attention to the actual race once the New Year’s bubbly wore off. That meant that for all of 2003, liberal party activists were in the driver’s seat when it came to deciding who would raise the most money and be anointed the front-runner in media coverage. That turned out to be Mr. Dean, who tapped into activist rage over the Bush administration’s war in Iraq and lingering anger over the disputed Florida recount in 2000.

But while “Bush loathing” is almost universal among Democratic partisans, it resonates with only about 20% of the electorate. Many of the people who don’t approve of Mr. Bush’s handling of his job are turned off by bitter attacks against him.

As something of a neo-institutionalist (despite my behaviorist credentials), the Fund-Nagourney thesis is pretty compelling. But I think the nature of the primary process in and of itself lets strong partisans set the tone for the general election campaign, even if they don’t always capture the nomination—consider the Buchanan insurgency against Bush 41 in 1992, which arguably helped kill Bush’s general election prospects. Even if we were talking about a traditional nominating schedule, Dean would be well-positioned to win, although the compressed schedule does make it less likely for the candidate who emerges from Iowa and New Hampshire to face a strong challenger when the campaign swings into the more populous—and arguably more typical—states.

Fundamentally, despite the “superdelegates” and other mechanisms implemented by the DNC to try to manipulate primary results to select electable nominees, a process that has only succeeded in a contested primary once since 1976, the Democrats have had a process that lends itself to capture by the strongest partisans since the McGovern Commission reforms in the early 1970s, which expanded the use of primaries by the Democrats, effects that were further enhanced by Jesse Jackson’s insistence on proportional delegate allocation after his relatively strong showing in the 1984 primaries didn’t translate into many delegates to the convention.

Link via Martin Devon, who has more on Howard Dean’s self-inflicted gaffes from an interview with Howard Fineman in this week’s Newsweek.

Dan Drezner wonders why Wes Clark isn’t catching flak for apparently advocating in the pages of the New York Times Magazine an international tribunal to judge Osama bin Laden—even though Howard Dean’s equivocation about the same topic drew derision from a number of quarters. Dan offers the following hypotheses:

1. What really attracted criticism of Dean was the equivocation about bin Laden’s guilt;
2. Dean’s the frontrunner, ergo he gets more flak;
3. Dean’s statement fits the dominant narrative of him being a foreign policy neophyte, while Clark’s statement does not fit the dominant narrative of him being a foreign policy professional—therefore, the latter quote gets overlooked.
4. Whatever you think of Clark’s answer, it’s clear that he cares about the question, and thinks the answer has important foreign policy implications. Dean thought the question to be unimportant.
5. It’s early in the news cycle.

The “dominant narrative” explanation seems to be the most compelling to me; however, Clark’s position is arguably consistent with the “foreign policy professional” narrative—I suspect there are civil servants at State who share Clark’s enthusiasm for an international tribunal to try bin Laden, as it fits the “terrorism as crime” schema for looking at the world. It’s also fair to say that the Des Moines Register Democratic debate—which Clark did not attend—probably fulfilled most peoples’ quota of “Democratic campaign news” for the day, thus burying the item. (Another explanation, that opinion leaders don’t pay that much attention to articles that appear in the NYT Magazine, as opposed to the main pages of the Grey Lady, is also potentially compelling.)

That being said, international tribunals are really only appropriate in circumstances where there is no existing judicial system that is competent to try the case. The case of bin Laden seems to me to be more consistent with that of the Libyan agents responsible for Lockerbie, who were tried under Scottish law because that was the jurisdiction in which the crime took place (the location of the trial was a political compromise to get Libya to extradite the agents responsible)—an international tribunal was inappropriate, as the Scottish judicial system is competent to try charges like murder and hijacking.

The larger question, I suppose, is whether bin Laden is properly seen as a “war criminal.” As bin Laden was not acting on behalf of a state actor (conspiracy theorizing about Saudi princes aside) in a zone of combat, I can’t see 9/11 as a “war crime” per se (it is a criminal act, and perhaps even an act of war—but my limited understanding of international law suggests that only states or state-like actors can commit acts of war); this would also suggest an international tribunal is inappropriate.

The end of the world is nigh: the University of Southern California and Louisiana State University are splitting the Division I-A college football championship due to a split between the AP and ESPN/USA Today polls. Mark my words: the Homeland Security Alert System is about to be bumped up a notch…

Also of vague interest: I finished in the top 10th percentile of the Sonic BowlMania Challenge, correctly predicting the outcomes of 18 of the 28 bowl games through a mixture of luck and foolhardiness (including putting 26 points on the Ole Miss Rebels, which—if we were talking about money—would be a very stupid course of action usually).