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Bollettino This is irresistable. Jonathan Chait, on the TNR blog , disses Dean for his anti-war position like this: "The antiwar left and the pro-Bush right, oddly enough, share a glaring misapprehension: Both believe that it can be true that Bush was lying, or that the war was a good idea, but not both. Of course this is nonsense. It's pretty clearly that the Bush administration cut corners (at the very least) in its case for war. But it's also clear that whatever the administration got wrong was only a small subset of its overall argument for war, and that the Bush administration's arguments for war were, in turn, only a small subset of the broader arguments for war. Readers of TNR should by now be familiar with lots of arguments for war that deviated from, or frankly contradicted, the administration's own." The TNR has set up its blog about candidates in school marm style -- they get As or Fs, depending on whether they've been good or bad stude

Bollettino Someone should buy Howard Dean a copy of Norman Mailer's Miami and the Siege of Chicago, because Mailer's description of Eugene McCarthy lands directly on what is wrong with the Dean campaign. Dean's campaign's problem has been diagnosed by various D.C. types as that classic one always being diagnosed by various D.C. types: too liberal. For these types, what Dean has to do is to appeal more to Southern Man -- by which is really meant, suburban white collar man. And suburban white collar man wants a Sister soul'ja moment; he wants lower taxes; he wants a strong military; he wants the end of welfare as we know it to mean welfare for poor people (not, say, traditional government supports for mortgages, agri-business, the defense industry and all the other fine things that employ suburban man). But we think Dean's real problem is that he is way, way too white. Which is what Mailer saw about McCarthy. Just as he saw that Humphry had what he called t

Bollettino Another week begins with a series of attacks. A U.S. soldier dies, a handful are wounded, and the headlines fill with the report that the Supreme Council, a group fo Iraqis, mostly exiles, picked by Bremer, has convened and decreed a holiday. However, even though we view the Supreme Council as more of a tool of the occupiers than a legitimate government, we think that the UN representative in Iraq is right. He supposedly urged the people on the council to accept their appointments by saying that power will inevitably be accrued by the thing. The tools will take over from the toolmaker. We think that is, in essence, true. And we think that Bremer, who seems to view Iraq as his opportunity to employ the economic shock tactics so manfully and disastrously employed by the Harvard boys in Yeltsin's Russia, is going to face resistance if he keeps going down that course. The question will then be: will Americans back down, or will they simply replace and gerrymande