MICKEY KAUS: Kerry’s not a flip-flopper — he’s a straddler. A vital distinction!

UPDATE: Ed Holston thinks I’m shortchanging Kaus’s analysis, and has further thoughts.

AS RELIABLE AS A BOSTON GLOBE PHOTO FEATURE! Gary Farber reports on the Rocky Mountain Blogger Bash.

Meanwhile, Jeff Goldstein wonders what happened to his pants. And Bill Quick thinks the drugs “must have been incredible.” But Walter in Denver wants to set the record straight.

THIS MEMORIAL DAY POST from Jeff Jarvis is worth reading.

SCOTT BURGESS DEBUNKS RACIST STEREOTYPES IN THE GUARDIAN: I wonder if someone will complain to the British authorities that The Guardian is peddling “hate speech?”

NICHOLAS KRISTOF WRITES:

I doff my hat, briefly, to President Bush.

Sudanese peasants will be naming their sons “George Bush” because he scored a humanitarian victory this week that could be a momentous event around the globe — although almost nobody noticed. It was Bush administration diplomacy that led to an accord to end a 20-year civil war between Sudan’s north and south after two million deaths.

If the peace holds, hundreds of thousands of lives will be saved, millions of refugees will return home, and a region of Africa may be revived.

But there’s a larger lesson here as well: messy African wars are not insoluble, and Western pressure can help save the day. So it’s all the more shameful that the world is failing to exert pressure on Sudan to halt genocide in its Darfur region. Darfur is unaffected by the new peace accords.

Indeed. William Sjostrom has some thoughts on why few people have noticed, or care. And here’s a Sudan blog that follows these issues.

SOME MEMORIAL DAY WEEKEND READING: This piece by Jack Neely on The Great War, at home and abroad, is quite good. It also makes clear that we’re still cleaning up the messes made by diplomats nearly a hundred years ago. And some things sound surprisingly contemporary: “Months after the Armistice, there remained a strong anti-occupation insurgency in Germany, and 1919 bred rumors of German saboteurs making their way to America.” No comparable waves of anti-immigrant hysteria this time around, though.

SO WHAT’S GOING ON? Mickey Kaus suggests that the new Iraqi interim prime minister, Iyad Allawi, was picked by Brahimi because his lack of grassroots support in Iraq ensures he won’t try to ensconce himself long-term.

But this BBC report says that Brahimi doesn’t like Allawi, and that he was forced to accede to his selection because the Iraqi Governing Council supported Allawi unanimously.

So which is it?

UPDATE: Looks like everybody else is as confused as I am!

TIM BLAIR, whose predictions of non-blogging turned out (like most such) to be overstated, is on a roll. Just keep scrolling.

BETTER ALL THE TIME: The Speculist’s regular roundup of good news is up.

KERRY GETS IT RIGHT:

In what his campaign billed as a major foreign-policy address, Kerry said that despite the fierce election-year politics, the country is standing together when it comes to preventing future attacks.

“This country is united in its determination to destroy you,” said Kerry of the terrorists, in the first of a series of foreign-policy speeches timed to coincide with Memorial Day and President Bush’s trip to Europe for D-Day ceremonies.

“As commander in chief, I will bring the full force of our nation’s power to bear on finding and crushing your networks. We will use every available resource to destroy you,” Kerry said in Seattle.

More like this, please.

MATTHEW YGLESIAS is defending the press from charges of engaging in behavior that some of its members have admitted (rooting for American defeat), while accusing me of something I didn’t do (inciting vandalism against the NYT).

Yglesias omits any mention of journalistic admissions (some collected or linked here) of delight at problems in Iraq, or even hope for a U.S. defeat. On the other hand, he accuses me of a “campaign to incite the defacement of New York Times distribution boxes.” However, if you read the post in question, you’ll see a crucial phrase undercutting Yglesias’ thesis: “Don’t do that!” (To his credit, Yglesias links the post, but he never explains how this could constitute incitement. However, though accusing me of advocating “mob violence,” he fails to note this post, in which I talk about how press irresponsibility may undermine press freedom in the context of changed First Amendment law, not peasants with pitchforks.)

Though Yglesias has gotten shriller since joining the Kuttner empire, this is unworthy of him, and I’m disappointed. However, his touchiness on this subject makes me think that perhaps the press realizes that its behavior is harming its reputation. And it is. Instead of blaming the messenger, perhaps a bit of soul-searching would be in order.

UPDATE: Matt is charged with violating Godwin’s law here and here. And reader John Mattaboni calls on me to note this straw man:

Yglesias: “The argument here – that everything is fine except the media coverage – is absurd on its face.”

It’s absurd on its face because no one is asserting that but him.

Good point. In fact, I’ve made the contrary observation before. For a more nuanced (it doesn’t compare me, Michael Barone, and Morton Kondracke to Hitler!), if still somewhat defensive, response to the press criticism, read this post by Jay Rosen.

HOWARD DEAN’S YEARRGH! SPEECH spawned some guerrilla web responses. Now Junkyard Blog has done the same with Al Gore’s MoveOn fulminations.

UPDATE: More on Gore’s outburst here.

ANOTHER UPDATE: More guerrilla media here. And Mike Rappaport observes: “Al Gore has called for the resignation of Donald Rumsfeld (and Condoleezza Rice). Given Gore’s track record, including the almost immediate implosion of Howard Dean after Gore endorsed him, this may be the best news for Rumsfeld in many days.”

And here’s a report from a parallel universe. Say, is this where Al Gore got the beard?

IF YOU’RE IN THE DENVER AREA, you might want to attend the Rocky Mountain Blogger Bash. I wish I could be there. Then again, Stephen Green and Jeff Goldstein are bad enough influences on me when they’re two time zones away. . . .

MICHAEL TOTTEN:

Pat Buchanan is being an ass again.

Fisking him may be, as Gerard Van der Leun likes to put it, one of those Fish. Barrel. Bang! type of deals. But still it’s something that needs to be done every couple of months to reduce the asininity quotient in American letters by an iota.

So here we go.

Read the whole thing.

AZIZ POONAWALLA IS UPSET that the Dean Campaign seems to be selling user data to other organizations. There’s some debate in the comments as to whether that’s what’s going on.

SOME THOUGHTS ON FRITZ HOLLINGS’ PROBLEMS WITH THE JEWS: “Hollings may or may not be anti-Semitic, but he’s almost certainly a fool.” I’m glad that Fritz is leaving the Senate. The Democrats should be, too.

PATRICK RUFFINI sends this link to an interactive webpage that lets you track John Kerry’s changing positions on Iraq. Say, maybe Sandy Berger should have checked that out before his recent statements.

“THEATER OF WAR” AS AN EXPANDING CONCEPT: The Belmont Club has thoughts.

LILEKS is chock-full of screedy goodness today. Don’t miss him.

DOUG KERN writes on why we need more cartoon violence, and on how Generation X suffered from the lack thereof: “(‘Super Friends,’ they called them, instead of the Justice League. The difference tells you everything you need to know about the seventies.)”

UNSCAM UPDATE: Claudia Rosett says the coverup is in full swing. I’m worried that the Administration is running cover for the UN on this one in the hopes of getting cooperation, and I think that if so — as with pretty much everything the Administration has done regarding the UN — they’re being snookered.

YEEARRGH! I missed Al Gore’s Howard Dean-like meltdown, but even Maureen Dowd was mocking him: “John Kerry’s advisers were surprised and annoyed to hear that Mr. Gore hollered so much, he made Howard Dean look like George Pataki. They don’t want voters to be reminded of the wackadoo wing of the Democratic Party.”

The Boston Herald, meanwhile, is even harsher:

He never mentioned Nicholas Berg. Or Daniel Pearl. Or a single person killed in the World Trade Center. Nor did former Vice President Al Gore talk of any soldier by name who has given his life in Iraq. And he has the audacity to condemn the Bush administration for having “twisted values?”

Gore spent the bulk of a speech before the liberal group MoveOn.org Wednesday bemoaning Abu Ghraib and denouncing President Bush’s departure from the “long successful strategy of containment.”

Yes, the very same strategy that, under Gore’s leadership, allowed al-Qaeda operatives to plan the horror of Sept. 11 for years, while moving freely within our borders. . . .

And this man – who apparently has so much disdain for the nature of the American people – wanted to be elected to lead it?

I was once a big Al Gore fan, but my attitude toward him has gone beyond disappointment. Now it’s something more like horror. He’s lost it.

UPDATE: Dean Peters has a roundup of blog-reactions.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Will Collier, meanwhile, is surprised at how little attention Gore’s speech got:

Why the silence? We’re talking about the last vice president of the United States, and a guy who was just 548 votes shy of being the president right now. This ought to be a big story, particularly for papers that had been very supportive of Gore in the past. Is he now considered irrelevant? Does the media think he’s become a nutbag, and thus unworthy of coverage? Could they be embarrassed by Gore’s descent into MoveOn.org moonbattery?

You can offer your suggested explanation in his comment section, if you like.

DANIEL DREZNER WRITES in The New Republic that the neocons were right on the war, but bad managers whose ineptitude has threatened an important cause: the democratization of the Middle East.

As is his custom, he has footnotes and amplifications on the column that are in some ways more interesting than the column itself. But you should read both.

Meanwhile Peter Robinson echoes a point of Drezner’s — that the prewar situation was unravelling and something had to be done — and notes:

Food in Iraq is everywhere available, clean water is flowing, electricity is being produced at levels higher than those before the war, hundreds of schools have been rebuilt and some 30,000 teachers trained—and whereas before the war Iraqi civilians were dying untimely deaths at the rate of 36,000 a year, now even an anti-war group estimates that in the last 14 months the number of Iraqi civilians to die unnatural deaths numbers at most about 11,000.

This represents a record of which George W. Bush is supposed to be ashamed?

(In a later post Robinson notes that the number of Iraqi lives saved is almost certainly much higher than the above number suggests.)This isn’t really in disagreement with Drezner, who notes in his blog post that he thinks things in Iraq are better than generally believed. To this mix you might add this post from Iraqi blogger Mohammed, who seems happier with the situation than either Drezner or Robinson, perhaps because his expectations are lower: “the reason for this is that I have lived under Saddam.”

Max Boot, meanwhile, reminds us that we’re at war, and observes: “The panic gripping Washington over the state of Iraq makes it clear we have been spoiled by the seemingly easy, apparently bloodless victories of the last decade. . . . Things look a little different if you compare it with earlier conflicts.” Read the whole thing, which offers a lot of useful perspective on casualties, nation-building, and mistakes in light of prior experience.

And, finally, you should read this piece by Arnold Kling: “The war in Iraq has produced a battle for hearts and minds — not over there so much as over here.”

ARTHUR CHRENKOFF posts another roundup of news from Iraq that you probably missed, on all sorts of topics including rebuilding, security, etc.

EUGENE VOLOKH EXPLAINS what makes him hot. Wonkette is mentioned.