BUSH’S SPEECH IN SPRINGFIELD TODAY addresses the war issue:

The world changed on a terrible September morning. And since that day, we’ve changed the world.

Before September the 11th, Afghanistan served as the home base for Al Qaida, which trained and deployed thousands of killers to set up terror cells in dozens of countries, including our own. Today, Afghanistan is a rising democracy, an ally in the war on terror, a place where many young girls go to school for the first time. And as a result of our actions, America and the world are safer.

Before September the 11th, Pakistan was a safe transit point for terrorists. Today, Pakistani forces are aggressively helping to round up the terrorists and America and the world are safer.

Before September the 11th, in Saudi Arabia, terrorists were raising money and recruiting and operating with little opposition. Today, the Saudi government has taken the fight to Al Qaida and America and the world are safer.

Before September the 11th, Libya was spending millions to acquire weapons of mass destruction. Today, because America and our allies have sent a strong and clear message, the leader of Libya has abandoned his pursuit of weapons of mass destruction and America and the world are safer.

Before September the 11th, the ruler of Iraq was a sworn enemy of America.

BUSH: He was defying the world. He was firing weapons at American pilots and forcing the world’s sanctions. He had pursued and used weapons of mass destruction against his own people. He had harbored terrorists. He invaded his neighbors. He subsidized the families of suicide bombers. He had murdered tens of thousands of his own citizens. He was a source of great instability in the world’s most vulnerable region.

I took those threats seriously. After September the 11th, we had to look at the threats in a new light. One of the lessons of September the 11th is we must deal with threats before they fully materialize.

The September the 11th commission concluded that our institutions of government had failed to imagine the horror of that day. After September the 11th, we cannot fail to imagine that a brutal tyrant, who hated America, who had ties to terror, had weapons of mass destruction and might use those weapons or share his deadly capability with terrorists was not a threat.

We looked at the intelligence. We saw a threat. Members of the United States Congress from both political parties, including my opponent, looked at the intelligence and they saw a threat.

Read the whole thing. (Via Blogged and Dangerous).

PARANOIA strikes deep.

MY MISERABLE FAILURE in not linking to the Carnival of the Vanities yesterday has now been remedied. Lots of cool posts from many different bloggers.

HERE’S A REPORT that Sandy Berger has been cleared of all wrongdoing. But here’s another report saying that the first report is wrong. Which is true? Beats me. Stay tuned.

UPDATE: Reader Edward Baer emails:

If the first report was correct, what are we to make of Berger’s previous statement that several documents that had inadvertently been removed by him had subsequently been inadvertently discarded? Was he lying about taking them, returning them or discarding them? Also, there is nothing in here about his breach of the rules in sneaking out his handwritten notes or about making prohibited cel phone calls from a secure room.

Beats me, but I’m sure it will all be made clear eventually.

TACITUS expresses further skepticism regarding the effect of Kerry’s speech: “It is when we turn to the NYT lead editorial on the same topic that we start to see that WaPo’s piece is not an outlier, but indicative of a broader problem with Kerry’s remarks, the Democratic National Convention, and the campaign itself.”

“FRANCE A PROBLEM FOR EUROPE:”

Monti’s inflexibility in applying EU rules has inspired fear. Nicknamed “Super Mario” for bending US giants Microsoft and General Electric to his will, he also drew the ire of French and German political and business leaders for making them hand back state aid, deemed illegal under EU competition rules. . . .

He is particularly scathing of France, which he scores for favouring the short-term interests of some big national companies to the detriment of EU economic development in general.

“France has become a problem for itself and for Europe. It cannot handle its successes, and often it doesn’t see them, and attributes its setbacks, which are often imaginary, to Europe.” . . .

And Monti believes the Berlusconi government has been too compliant in its dealings with France and Germany. “There’s no point in doing favours which will not be returned, to win the sympathy of the powerful.”

Somebody arrange a meeting with John Kerry.

WEIRD: Earlier I linked to an ABC story about suggested mob connections regarding Hollywood moneyman Stephen Bing. Now when you follow the link you get a “content not available” page — though the link and synopsis for the story still shows up when you search “Stephen Bing” on the ABC site.

This either means that the story has been pulled because it contains errors, or because somebody persuaded ABC to pull it for other reasons. Since ABC doesn’t say, we can only speculate.

UPDATE: Here’s more on Bing from The Independent:

One of the Democrats’ biggest contributors is Hollywood producer Steve Bing, the ungentlemanly cad who impregnated poor English rose Liz Hurley and didn’t do the decent thing . Bing has been more than generous to the Democrats however, contributing $16m. But law enforcement officials have told ABC News that Bing is a friend and business partner of Dominic Montemarano, a New York Mafia figure currently in prison on racketeering charges. Montemarano is better known by his street name Donnie Shacks. No word yet from Bing.

And no word, anymore, from ABC. Perhaps there’s nothing to this story, though you have to worry. And surely any normal man with would want to take credit for impregnating Liz Hurley, regardless of the truth. . . .

MORE: Here’s another report on Bing’s alleged mob connections from the Post.

JOSHUA CLAYBOURN: “My question is rather simple: From here on out, what would Kerry do differently in Iraq?”

I was hoping to hear that question answered last night. But as the Washington Post observes:

Mr. Kerry therefore sought above all to make the case that he could be trusted to lead a nation at war, and rightly so; he and Mr. Bush must be judged first and foremost on those grounds. But on that basis, though Mr. Kerry spoke confidently and eloquently, his speech was in many respects a disappointment.

The responsibility of sending troops into danger should weigh on a commander in chief. But so must the responsibility of protecting the nation against a shadowy foe not easily deterred by traditional means. Mr. Kerry last night elided the charged question of whether, as president, he would have gone to war in Iraq. He offered not a word to celebrate the freeing of Afghans from the Taliban, or Iraqis from Saddam Hussein, and not a word about helping either nation toward democracy. . . .

Nor did Mr. Kerry’s statements about future threats do justice to the complexity of today’s challenge. . . . Mr. Kerry missed an opportunity for straight talk.

I agree. Meanwhile, Holman Jenkins observes: “It’s no secret a great many Democrats are skeptical of Mr. Kerry. These are exactly the Democrats now arguing that he can win by signaling to voters an end to America’s exertions, an end to drama, a time of rest. That’s the real message of Mr. Kerry’s constant invoking of Vietnam. That’s the real strength of his campaign: I was daring and adventurous then, and had my fill.”

IS RUSSIA THE NEXT ZIMBABWE?

But the destruction of Yukos is about more than a rich, arrogant jerk getting his deserts and investors in one of the world’s riskiest stock markets getting burned. At stake is the direction of Russia’s ongoing experiment with its unique brand of post-Soviet capitalism and whether the privatization process that forms the foundation of Russia’s economy will be subjected to additional modification. Arguably, this could lay the groundwork for “more competition in the workplace and greater social equality,” says Lavelle.

But once the renationalization genie is out of its bottle, stuffing it back in will be difficult. And competing for the title of the northern hemisphere’s version of Zimbabwe, where Robert Mugabe committed macroeconomic suicide by seizing farms from white landowners, is probably not the way the newest member of the G8 club of supposedly developed nations wants to make its mark. Foreign investment, the lifeblood of the economic growth before which Putin piously pretends to genuflect, will take a holiday far away. Meanwhile, fears that Yukos will stop pumping oil are pushing global oil prices to fresh highs.

That would indeed be suicidally stupid for Putin — but such behavior is not unthinkable. And this explains how hard it is to turn a former dictatorship into a free-market democracy. The Cold War ended over a decade ago, and Russia is still in an uncertain state. This should put Iraq’s transition in perspective.

THANKS, ANDREW: I didn’t think you really meant that. Very handsomely done.

WINDS OF DISCOVERY has a roundup of all sorts of interesting scientific and technical news. Don’t miss it.

ARNOLD KLING has thoughts on Kerry’s strategy.

THE NEW REPUBLIC’S JASON ZENGERLE reports on seeing Joe Wilson at the Democratic convention:

To my ears, Wilson’s explanations rang hollow, either misrepresenting the charges against him or making new claims that were impossible to verify. His performance left me convinced that his credibility is pretty much shot. But the rest of the room didn’t seem to agree. They gave Wilson a prolonged standing ovation after his speech–and the former ambassador had a big smile on his face for the rest of the afternoon. His “road to Boston” may have been bumpy, but you could tell he was glad he came.

Indeed.

SANDY BERGER UPDATE: Trent Telenko has a substantial post with lots of links and analysis.

THE STEM CELL ISSUE must be polling really well for the Democrats:

Sen. Dianne Feinstein began her first official national online petition drive in 12 years in the Senate on Thursday in an effort to persuade President Bush to reverse his August 2001 decision that limited federal support for stem cell research.

Feinstein’s drive came after Ron Reagan, son of the former president, addressed the Democratic National Convention on Tuesday and urged greater support for embryonic stem cell research, which advocates say could create treatments or cures for a host of conditions, including Alzheimer’s disease, the ailment that led to the death in June of former President Ronald Reagan.

Stem-cell opponent Sen. Sam Brownback (R-Kan) is even getting pushback at home. I think the Democrats are right on this issue, and I’m glad they’re pushing it.

UPDATE: For a contrary view, read this piece by Michael Fumento. I tend to like Fumento, when he’s not calling Rich Hailey fat, but I think that there are two issues here. One is the argument — more-or-less made by Ron Reagan, Jr. — that we’d be curing Alzheimer’s now if it werent’ for those mean old Republicans. That’s rather weak. The other is the argument that we’ll be able to do everything we want with adult stem cells anyway, so there’s no harm in banning research with embryonic stem cells. This may turn out to be true eventually, but I’m not convinced that embryonic stem cell research won’t play an important role in getting us there. It’s a bit like supporting a ban on propeller aircraft in 1930, on the ground that everyone will be flying jets soon anyway. . . .

KERRY’S CAMPAIGN STAFF made bogus dirty tricks charges regarding the bunny-suit photo, and as a result gave the story serious legs, most recently in the form of this fashion analysis from the Washington Post:

The suit did not humanize Kerry. It did not make him look tough. Maybe if Kerry had had a surgical mask hanging around his neck, the suit would have given him the heroic glow of a surgeon emerging from the operating theater to announce that the patient will survive. Instead, the image left one wondering whether the suit had a back flap and attached feet. . . .

Being generous, one might argue that Kerry’s intellectual curiosity caused him to ignore how ridiculous he would look in the clean gear. The chance to crawl around in a spaceship was too tempting. Most folks would find that hard to pass up. But he is not most people — he wants to be president. As a general rule, anyone aspiring to be the commander in chief should always try to avoid looking like a Teletubby.

It would have been better to laugh it off.

HUGH HEWITT on convention blogging:

Bloggers acquitted themselves well because they are a very smart group. In fact, I think it is hard to overstate how much better informed Matt Yglesias, Matt Welch, Mickey Kaus, and Tim Blair — all of whom I interviewed on air — are than every elected official I interviewed. These are serious thinkers though with good humor mixed in, and the blogosphere is simply the democratization of punditry, with the result that talent wins.

The arrival of the bloggers is a big deal. They’ll never not be here in the future, and now the question is who gets to blog the debates?

Hmm.

DARFUR UPDATE:

The Sudanese government has carried out a murderous campaign in its Darfur region through deliberate bombing of civilian targets and through support of Arab militias known as janjaweed raping and killing on the ground. Khartoum cannot be trusted to end the killing, though it may see some temporary gain in slowing or pausing it.

Yet current international measures seem to depend on the Sudanese government as a partner.

I agree that this is a dubious approach.

ABC NEWS is running a rather troubling story about mob connections for Kerry fundraiser Stephen Bing:

He is Stephen Bing, a wealthy film producer who, with little fanfare, has managed to steer a total of more than $16 million of his money to Democratic candidates and the supposedly independent groups that support them.

“To most of the people who track money and politics, they’re like, who the hell is Steve Bing?” said Chuck Lewis, founder of the Center for Public Integrity, a nonprofit, nonpartisan watchdog organization.

Bing is perhaps best known for sparking a tabloid frenzy when he publicly expressed doubt that he was the father of actress Elizabeth Hurley’s baby. (A paternity test proved he was indeed the father.) He repeatedly has refused to say why he is funneling millions of dollars to the Democrats.

Lewis thinks it is cause for concern.

“We can identify who the big donors are, but how much do we really know about any of them?” he said.

In fact, Democratic Party officials said they knew nothing about the man who law enforcement officials tell ABC News is Bing’s friend and business partner — Dominic Montemarano, a New York Mafia figure currently in federal prison on racketeering charges.

This seems as if it has the potential for embarrassment. And wasn’t campaign finance “reform” supposed to put an end to this sort of thing? I guess it didn’t work:

“This is money to curry favor, to gain influence,” said Wertheimer. “The very thing that the Watergate laws were designed to stop.”

It’s as if the whole enterprise was a sham.

UPDATE: Much more on Bing and the entertainment-industrial complex’s relationship to politics can be found in this article by Eric Alterman:

The Center for Responsive Politics calculates Bing’s (pre-McCain-Feingold) 2002-cycle donations to the Democrats at $8.7 million. Recently George Soros came to Hollywood to raise money in a series of private billionaire-to-billionaire meetings for America Coming Together and The Media Fund, the coordinated anti-Bush organizations created to fit within the strictures of campaign-finance laws, to which he has promised $10 million. A kind of shadow Democratic Party, ACT and The Media Fund (under the joint fundraising umbrella of Victory Campaign 2004) are 527 organizations: they independently raise and spend money to identify voters and buy air time for advertising. These and other 527 organizations, on the left and the right, have come in for a lot of heat, because contributions are unlimited so long as the organization does not communicate with any candidate or official party committee—and everyone suspects that the concept “does not communicate” has been vitiated by Talmudic parsing. I’m told that after seeing Soros, Bing upped his contribution from $2 million to nearly $7 million, just like that. No wonder the constant refrain from the politically connected in Hollywood is “What we need more than anything is more Steve Bings.”

Maybe, maybe not.

AN INTERESTING REPORT OF OUTSOURCING AT THE DEMOCRATIC CONVENTION: See, I told you it would be an issue. . . .

JOE WILSON UPDATE: He’s not going away, apparently.

OKAY, THE OTHER THREAD’S CLOSED. Please post your sum-up comments here. And sorry about the delays and double-posts — between traffic, comment, and Internet backups, they’re kind of slow. Please give ’em a while to register.

My take: A not-bad speech, badly delivered. It was short on substance, and long on cliches, but nomination acceptance speeches often are. It was too long, and his delivery was rushed. The sweating and bizarre gestures didn’t help. I don’t think it will swing the momentum in his favor, which is what he needed. It may turn some people off.

UPDATE: No, I don’t know what happened to the other post. It just vanished when I saved this one. Dang. I’m going to see if I can get it back.

ANOTHER UPDATE: More here.

And Ed Morrissey and Stephen Green were liveblogging.

MORE: Still trying to get the old thread back. (This is all that’s left of it). But reader David Schneider-Joseph saved some of it in his RSS reader. There were something like twice this many comments last I noticed, but at least some of it’s saved. I’m posting them separately later, if the thread can’t be saved.

And reader Richard Whitten comments: “McCain-Lieberman 2004!”

STILL MORE: David Hogberg comments here. And there’s this observation: “He was talking to Middle America tonight…in an attempt to identify himself as one of them.” More liveblogging here, and here. And here.

More thoughts on Kerry’s resume here. And there’s this: “The homeless are back! Did they de-camp from Lafayette Park during the Clinton years?”

MORE STILL: Here are some comments, posted below, that are worth repeating:

Kerry is not a horrible person, and neither is Bush. Neither is a particualrly wonderful candidate, and we have to settle for the least harmful instead of the best.

Kerry needed to convince me that he was honestly going to protect us. He dd everything he could, and I now realize that it was always too late, my mind was made up. Kerry has cared about the direction of the wind far too many times for me to ever trust him.

That’s tragic. He seems to really understand what the right answer is, but I imagine some number of people just don’t know if he would trade that for votes or poll numbers.

Yeah, that seems about right to me, too.

Meanwhile Patrick Belton — blogging from the convention center — has a more positive take than a lot of the people linked above. I wonder if Kerry looks better live than on TV. Even Belton has his issues, though: “weak attempt to sex up the fact his staff told him to plug his website: ‘So now I’m going to say something that Franklin Roosevelt could never have said in his acceptance speech: go to johnkerry.com.’ Umm, that’s because they have different names….”

Andrew Sullivan: “I really don’t know what the impact of this speech will be. I doubt it will help him much. I definitely liked Kerry less at the end of it than at the beginning. . . . I think this convention has been a huge success, tempered by a bad candidate.”

Jeff Jarvis: “It was, oddly, a military speech aimed at not using the military. . . . There was nothing to hate in the speech, nothing to love. It was competent.”

Jonah Goldberg: ” It sounds like it was written by a committee. The funny irony is that Kerry is a committee of one.”

Nick Gillespie was liveblogging. And Jesse Walker reflects that he’s not the target audience for these things. Me neither.

James Lileks comments:

“I defended this country as a young man, and I will defend it as President.”

This really intrigues me. I agree that Vietnam was a defense of the United States, inasmuch as we were trying to blunt the advance of Communism. So: only Nixon can go to China. (Only Kirk can go to Chronos, for you Star Trek geeks.) Only Kerry can confirm that Vietnam was a just war. This completely upends conventional wisdom about the Vietnamese war, and requires a certain amount of historical amnesia.

Mickey Kaus: “Good enough! . . . I predict a measurable bounce, if anybody was watching.”

Closed comments on this post now; I’m going to bed. Sorry Jay!

NEXT MORNING UPDATE: Tom Maguire liveblogged it. Excerpt:

“And as President, I will bring back this nation’s time-honored tradition: the United States of America never goes to war because we want to, we only go to war because we have to.”

Why we had to go to war in Kosovo remains a mystery, but this has been a Kerry line for over a year. [Mini-update – Watching Frank Luntz and his panel of voters on MSNBC, this line is reprised, and the first panelist to comment mentions Yugoslavia, and thinks Kerry is kidding on this. The rebuttal goes national!]

Daniel Drezner: “Given the emphasis on a positive message emanating from this convention, Kerry took harder shots than I expected at Bush — but I thought his foreign policy critique hit home.”

Hugh Hewitt: “[H]e didn’t bore people, which was a real concern. His timing was often off, but not fatally so. So he gets a B. Not a home run, but a solid single. He needed a home run.”

And finally, I’m guessing that this is a typo in Howard Kurtz’s column this morning — or maybe an anonymous typesetter’s comment on what Kurtz notes as the remarkably unanimous praise for the speech from mainstream media:

For USA Today, it’s a series of stirring images:

“The Democrats have gone to a war footing.

“John Kerry accepted the nomination of his party Thursday night with a speech more muscular than any Democratic presidential nominee has given at a convention in four decades.

“{bull} Consider the images in the biographical video that introduced him: snapshots of a young Kerry squinting into the sun with the crew of the swift boat he captained in Vietnam, and of him standing ramrod-straight in a crisp white uniform as a Bronze Star was pinned on his chest.

“{bull} Consider the friend he chose to introduce him: former Georgia senator Max Cleland, a veteran who returned from Vietnam in a wheelchair, both legs and one arm blown off by a grenade.

“{bull} Consider the words he used in his speech: Strength. Tough. Fight. Defend. Force. Attack. Security.”

Heh.

THIS IS A RECONSTRUCTED POST: My open-comment thread letting people liveblog the speech vanished — the server was overloaded and was having problems before they restarted, and that may have something to do with it. Anyway, some of the comments were saved by readers, and here’s a good chunk. Click “more” to read the post and comments.

(more…)

PEOPLE ARE BEING CHUCKED OUT OF FLEET CENTER by the thousands, according to OxBlog. Apparently, too many folks are there. It’s probably the ones who snuck in.

IF OSAMA’S CAPTURED TONIGHT, The New York Times is ready.

And no, Ahmed Ghailani [Who? — ed.] doesn’t count.