NEANDERTHALS UNITE!....Harvard alum Michael Winerip has been interviewing Harvard applicants for the past decade. In the New York Times on Sunday, he wrote a piece that perfectly mirrors something I've thought for a long time:

Meeting the soon-to-be rejected makes me hopeful about young people. They are far more accomplished than I was at their age and without a doubt will do superbly wherever they go.

Knowing me and seeing them is like witnessing some major evolutionary change take place in just 35 years, from the Neanderthal Harvard applicant of 1970 to today's fully evolved Homo sapiens applicant.

....What kind of kid doesn't get into Harvard? Well, there was the charming boy I interviewed with 1560 SATs. He did cancer research in the summer; played two instruments in three orchestras; and composed his own music. He redid the computer system for his student paper, loved to cook and was writing his own cookbook. One of his specialties was snapper poached in tea and served with noodle cake.

In 1975, I applied to Stanford, Caltech, and UC San Diego and was accepted by all three. This was no big surprise: I was an A student, scored 1420 on the SAT, attended an NSF math program the summer after my junior year, had two varsity letters, and was editor of the school paper. Not bad! But as near as I can tell, it would barely get me an interview at a place like Stanford or Harvard these days. I suppose I'd still make it into UCSD, but that's about it.

I dunno. Is this true? Would the Kevin Drum of 1975 be able to get into a top school in 2007? I suppose it's impossible to say. The SAT was renormed in 1995 and my old 1420 would be a 1490 today. I'd have a bunch of AP classes under my belt not because I was any smarter, but because suburban high schools all offer loads of AP classes these days. And I'd probably do outside volunteer work or something on weekends — not because I'm any more altruistic than I was then, but just because everyone knows that's what you need to do if you're trying to get into a top school.

So who knows. Maybe it's just a trick of the light. But all I can say from reading news reports is that the kids who get into elite universities today sure seem a damn sight more accomplished than me or anyone else I knew back in 1975. Like Winerip, I feel like a neanderthal.

On the other hand, we boomers still rule the world. Smarter or not, homo super-accomplishmentus will just have to wait their turns.

"BLINK"ING THE CANDIDATES....This is quite a fascinating little chart from the Pew Research Center. I feel like I ought to have something deep and meaningful to say about it, but I really don't. I do, however, have a few garden variety observations.

First: Hillary Clinton is viewed as more liberal than Barack Obama? Both Republicans and Democrats agree about this, and, needless to say, both Republicans and Democrats are very, very wrong on this score. Apparently the power of perception is hard to break down.

Second: For fans of the Downs Median Voter Theorem, it's worth noting that all of the major Republican candidates are viewed as closer to the middle than any of the major Democratic candidates. (This depends only slightly on how you define "middle." Pew uses a scale of 1 to 6, so the mathematical middle is 3.5. However, the self-identified middle is 3.4, as is the self-identified position of independents.) This is potentially bad news for Democrats.

Third: Over at Ezra's place, Neil points out that John Edwards, who is arguably the most progressive candidate, is viewed as the most centrist. This is potentially good news for both progressives and for John Edwards, since it means the candidate most likely to pursue a progressive agenda once he's in office is also the candidate who's most electable.

Other stuff: Democrats and Republicans rate the Republican candidates almost identically, but they differ quite strongly in their ratings of the Democratic candidates. I'm not quite sure what this means.

Finally, the average Republican rates herself farther from the middle than the average Democrat. The average Democrat, therefore, is ideologically fairly close to all the major Dem candidates, while the average Republican is quite distant from theirs. Again, I'm not quite sure how this will play out.

At any rate, it's good stuff for political junky types, and the full poll has some other, equally interesting findings. Judging from the questions about who's the strongest leader, who's the most inspiring, who's the most electable, etc., for example, the primaries shouldn't even be close. It'll be Clinton vs. Giuliani in a walk. We'll see.

TARNISHED HALO....Ana Marie Cox, back from spending some face time on the Straight Talk Express, explains how John McCain's willingness to talk to the press endlessly isn't buying him as much love as it did in 2004:

In the past, this tremendous access bred a certain amount of protectiveness among some journalists — you don't want to play "gotcha" with someone who gives all the time. The dynamic on this campaign is slightly different, and the coverage — including mine — shows it. Those new to covering him want to prove they won't fall for the old guy's charm. Those who covered him in 2000 want to prove they never did. Congratulations, blogosphere!

Sounds about right to me, though there's hardly any need to bend over backwards here. If McCain merely gets the coverage he deserves, he's doomed.

PROBLEMS WITH THE METRIC SYSTEM....Megan complains today about the rigidity of TSA regulations for carrying small bottles of liquid onto airplanes. That's nothing. A reader who works as a TSA screener emailed me a couple of weeks ago to say that he has had "easily dozens of run-ins with passengers (and other screeners)" about whether it's legal to carry on a 100 gram bottle. You see, 100 grams is 3.52 ounces by weight (just over the limit!). But, by volume, 100 grams of water = 100 milliliters, and 100 ml is 3.38 fluid ounces (just under the limit!). So that 100 gram bottle probably contains 3.38 fluid ounces of stuff, but 3.52 avoirdupois ounces. What to do?

Just thought you'd all like to know.

ROUGH DRAFT....George Tenet explains the Downing Street Memos. Read it and weep.

THE ECONOMIC CONSEQUENCES OF THE PEACE....Niall Ferguson thinks Wall Street isn't taking the Iraq War seriously enough:

It took a long time for American investors to acknowledge that there might be an economic as well as a strategic downside to failure in Vietnam. The Dow hit 1051.70 on Jan. 11, 1973. By Dec. 6, 1974, it had fallen by nearly half.

[....]

If McCain is right and the Middle East does blow up some time after an American exit from Iraq, oil could end up at $100 a barrel. Then what? Well, how about higher inflation, a dollar slide and a stock market sell-off?

We're supposed to stay in Iraq because it's helping prop up the stock market? That's some seriously warped thinking. And what makes it even weirder is the part I left out, in which Ferguson admits that Vietnam had little or nothing to do with the 1973-74 stock market selloff. This gets him points for honesty, I guess, but for some reason it still didn't stop him from charging ahead with his fears that leaving Iraq might bring the American economy to its knees.

In any case, I suspect Ferguson has it exactly backwards. Spare pumping capacity is so low right now that any serious disruption in oil supply could indeed send prices skyrocketing — and unfortunately, there are plenty of possible disruption scenarios. But while some of these scenarios are either unrelated to Iraq or related to our departure, even more of them, I think, are related to our staying. For some reason, though, hawks always forget about those kinds of scenarios.

Perhaps the question Ferguson should have asked himself is this: If LBJ had exited Vietnam in 1968, after four years of fruitless escalation, how would the American economy have done in the 70s? Probably better, and certainly no worse. What lesson does this hold for four years of fruitless escalation in Iraq?

MISDIAGNOSIS?....In our current issue, Phil Longman reviews Sick, Jon Cohn's new book about the dysfunctional American healthcare system. But he thinks Cohn has misdiagnosed the disease. Money can't really be our core problem, he says, since the evidence indicates that the more you spend, the worse your treatment is likely to be:

According to a recent RAND study published in the New England Journal of Medicine, uninsured patients receive only 53.7 percent of the care experts believe they should get — that is, appropriate, evidence-based treatment. But according to the same study, patients with private, fee-for-service insurance are even less likely to receive the proper care. Indeed, among Americans receiving acute care, those who lack insurance stand a slightly better chance of receiving proper treatment than patients covered by Medicaid, Medicare, or any form of private insurance.

....[Dr. Elliot Fisher] found that in America's highest-spending hospitals, only 74.8 percent of heart attack victims receive aspirin upon discharge from the hospital, as opposed to 83.5 percent in lower-budget competitors. This may be one reason why survival rates for heart attack victims are actually higher in low-spending hospitals than in high-spending hospitals.

What's more, these spendthrift hospitals often skip other routine preventative care such as flu vaccines, Pap smears, and mammograms. This general lack of attention to prevention and follow-up care in high-spending hospitals helps to explain why not only heart attack victims but also patients suffering from colon cancer and hip fractures stand a better chance of living longer if they stay away from "elite" hospitals and choose a lower-cost provider instead. Given this reality, it is perhaps not surprising that patient satisfaction also declines as a hospital's spending per patient rises.

So what does Longman think the answer is? Click the link to find out. Or buy his new book. Or buy 'em both.

RAMADI....Both the LA Times (here) and the New York Times (here) have features in today's papers about American success in the city of Ramadi, which has become this year's version of Tall Afar: the shining success story that everyone in the Army wants to show off. So which account should you read? Answer: If you want the feel-good version of the story, read the LA Times, but if you want at least a hint at the context of what's really going on, read the New York Times:

Many Sunni tribal leaders, once openly hostile to the American presence, have formed a united front with American and Iraqi government forces against Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia.

....Some American officials readily acknowledge that they have entered an uncertain marriage of convenience with the tribes, some of whom were themselves involved in the insurgency, to one extent or another....These sudden changes have raised questions about the ultimate loyalties of the United States' new allies.

....The turnabout began last September, when a federation of tribes in the Ramadi area came together as the Anbar Salvation Council to oppose the fundamentalist militants of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia....For all the sheiks' hostility toward the Americans, they realized that they had a bigger enemy, or at least one that needed to be fought first, as a matter of survival.

Italics mine. Ramadi really is a success story (as was Tall Afar), and it's heartening to see that U.S. forces are smart enough to find wedges where they can and exploit them. At the same time, even in Ramadi, the insurgency is far from gone. Once al-Qaeda has been safely dispatched, how long will it be until the rest of the Sunni factions decide to turn their attention back to an American occupying force that looks like it's planning to stay forever?

Conversely, how would that dynamic change if we provided the sheiks with credible assurances that American troops would begin withdrawing in the forseeable future? Without that, our success in Ramadi is likely to be short lived.

GO AWAY....Michael Finnegan writes in the LA Times today that the current political landscape for Republicans is so toxic that the party is having trouble finding good candidates to contest even winnable House seats in 2008. That's not really all that surprising. But here's the best part of Finnegan's piece:

And in New Hampshire, nonpartisan pollster Dick Bennett said the atmosphere is so sour that he is having a tough time getting Republicans to participate in surveys. The war, high gas prices and unhappiness with the Bush administration all have dampened their interest sharing opinions, he said.

Republicans are too depressed to even answer poll questions? That's toxic.

WHAT'S THERE TO TALK ABOUT?....George Tenet says no one in the White House ever had a serious conversation about whether invading Iraq was a good idea. Dan Bartlett says they had plenty of them. James Fallows isn't buying:

I say plainly: that is a lie. To be precise about it, no account of the Administration's deliberations, by anyone other than Bartlett just now, offers even the slightest evidence that this claim is true. Innumerable accounts offer ample evidence that it is false. I have asked this direct question to many interviewees who were in a position to know: was there ever such a meeting or discussion? The answer was always, No. The followup challenge to Bartlett should be: show us a memo, show us a policy paper, show us a scheduled meeting, show us notes taken at the time to substantiate the idea that the Administration ever seriously considered what the nation would gain or lose by invading Iraq, and what the alternatives might be. What the Administration actually considered, according to all known evidence, is how it would invade Iraq, and when.

Goodness. So shrill. Come on, Jim, it was only a trifling little Mideast war. Wouldn't a "memo," as you so quaintly call it, have been rather a lot of overkill?

IT'S HALLEY'S COMET!....Why did the White House conduct those pre-election "informational briefings" for federal agencies that just happened to include extensive information about which vulnerable Republicans were most urgently in need of help? White House spokeswoman Dana Perino didn't have any plausible answers at hand yesterday, so apparently she just pulled out Excuse #23 from the permanent file: Clinton did it too!

She was wrong, but who can blame her for trying? It usually works fine.

NO LIGHT IN THE TUNNEL....Is it a surge or an escalation?

The Bush administration will not try to assess whether the troop increase in Iraq is producing signs of political progress or greater security until September, and many of Mr. Bush's top advisers now anticipate that any gains by then will be limited, according to senior administration officials.

In interviews over the past week, the officials made clear that the White House is gradually scaling back its expectations for the government of President Nuri Kamal al-Maliki. The timelines they are now discussing suggest that the White House may maintain the increased numbers of American troops in Iraq well into next year.

Translation: Maliki has no authority whatsoever; the Iraqi troops we've been training for the past three years are still useless; there's no political progress in sight; and in the meantime we're stalling for dear life, hoping against hope that something good magically happens. In Republican leadership circles, this is called a "foreign policy." The rest of us have a different name for it.

TERRORISM UPDATE....This year's report on global terrorism will show a 25% increase in terror attacks between 2005 and 2006, "almost all of it due to incidents in Iraq and Afghanistan" according to McClatchy. Then there's this:

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and her top aides had considered postponing or downplaying the release of this year's edition, due to the extreme political sensitivities, several officials said. But ultimately, they decided to issue the report on or about the congressionally mandated deadline of Tuesday, the officials said.

Say what? They considered postponing a congressionally mandated report because it might be inconvenient for the president's war policy? Is there some kind of "political sensitivities" exemption in the law?

FRIDAY CATBLOGGING....If I'd been on the ball, I would have taken pictures of the cats playing with the catnip plants in our garden yesterday. But I wasn't. So instead you get whatever they were doing this morning, which isn't much. However, since the action shot of Inkblot last week was so popular, here's another one. What passes for action around these parts, anyway.

BLASTING THE BRASS....Lt. Col. Paul Yingling, one of the officers responsible for the Army's success in Tall Afar last year, has penned a blistering attack in the Armed Forces Journal aimed at our current military brass:

Despite paying lip service to "transformation" throughout the 1990s, America's armed forces failed to change in significant ways after the end of the 1991 Persian Gulf War....Having spent a decade preparing to fight the wrong war, America's generals then miscalculated both the means and ways necessary to succeed in Iraq....Privately, many senior general officers both active and retired expressed serious misgivings about the insufficiency of forces for Iraq. These leaders would later express their concerns in tell-all books such as "Fiasco" and "Cobra II." However, when the U.S. went to war in Iraq with less than half the strength required to win, these leaders did not make their objections public.

....In 1997, the U.S. Central Command exercise "Desert Crossing" demonstrated that many postwar stabilization tasks would fall to the military. The other branches of the U.S. government lacked sufficient capability to do such work on the scale required in Iraq. Despite these results, CENTCOM accepted the assumption that the State Department would administer postwar Iraq. The military never explained to the president the magnitude of the challenges inherent in stabilizing postwar Iraq.

....After failing to visualize the conditions of combat in Iraq, America's generals failed to adapt to the demands of counterinsurgency....After going into Iraq with too few troops and no coherent plan for postwar stabilization, America's general officer corps did not accurately portray the intensity of the insurgency to the American public....The intellectual and moral failures common to America's general officer corps in Vietnam and Iraq constitute a crisis in American generalship.

Phil Carter, who returned last year from a tour in Iraq, is impressed:

This is an incisive and brilliant article — it is precisely the kind of ruthless self-examination which is so necessary for an army at war. Unfortunately, Lt. Col. Yingling is one of the few officers with the moral courage to make this point so far. Although I've heard this argument made (in somewhat less sophisticated fashion) by a number of military friends and colleagues, I have not seen it made publicly and on-the-record by many. That speaks to a moral decline within the American military, and perhaps to the triumph of careerism over integrity. Perhaps I'm exaggerating here, but given the scope of these failures, I'm disappointed to see so few officers speaking out like this.

Here's a question: Careerism probably explains why criticism like this is so rare among military officers, but why is it also so rare even among civilians? I suspect there are several dynamics at work. First, criticizing the brass seems a little too close to criticizing the troops, and no one wants to be caught anywhere even colorably close to that. Second, especially among liberals, no one wants to take the heat off the Bush administration, and sharp criticism of the military leadership inevitably suggests that the White House might not be entirely to blame for the Iraq debacle. And third, there's a legitimate question of how strongly general officers should push back against their civilian leadership. There's a line where that pushback morphs into bureaucratic resistance to presidential will (Bill Clinton ran into this more than once, where military leaders essentially manufactured scenarios that made presidential action impossible), and no one is quite sure where that line is.

These are understandable concerns, but they're hardly compelling reasons for silence. Among other things, Iraq has made clear not just that our military isn't equipped to effectively fight non-conventional wars, but that even now it continues to be largely uninterested in fighting non-conventional wars. It would rather have its toys, and in this it's aided and abetted as it always has been by a Congress more interested in military pork for constituents and contributors than it is in figuring out what our military really ought to look like ten years from now. Yingling's article is a wakeup call.

A WEE PROPOSAL....I've got a deal to propose. Here it is: Debate moderators agree to stop asking moronic questions and presidential candidates agree to actually answer the questions they do ask. Wouldn't that be great?

And now, back to reality.....

MORE TENET....The New York Times has a copy of George Tenet's new book ("purchased at retail price in advance of publication"!), and it sounds like it must be a snoozer. Here's about the best thing they could find to excerpt from it:

Mr. Tenet hints at some score-settling in the book. He describes in particular the extraordinary tension between him and Condoleezza Rice, then national security adviser, and her deputy, Stephen J. Hadley, in internal debate over how the president came to say erroneously in his 2003 State of the Union address that Iraq was seeking uranium in Africa.

He describes an episode in 2003, shortly after he issued a statement taking partial responsibility for that error. He said he was invited over for a Sunday afternoon, back-patio lemonade by Colin L. Powell, then secretary of state. Mr. Powell described what Mr. Tenet called "a lively debate" on Air Force One a few days before about whether the White House should continue to support Mr. Tenet as C.I.A. director.

"In the end, the president said yes, and said so publicly," Mr. Tenet wrote. "But Colin let me know that other officials, particularly the vice president, had quite another view."

What else? Tenet now says that the pre-war CIA assessment of Iraqi WMD was "one of the lowest moments of my seven-year tenure." He thinks maybe he shouldn't have accepted his Presidential Medal of Freedom. And he says a small group of insane hawks inside the administration were obsessed with Iraq almost from the moment the Twin Towers fell. None of this is exactly breaking news.

And George Bush? He is "portrayed personally in a largely positive light." Sounds like Tenet still hasn't quite figured out that the cossacks report to the czar.

WHY TEACHERS QUIT....Ken Futernick of the Center for Teacher Quality at Cal State Sacramento recently conducted a study of why teachers drop out of teaching. The study itself seems so poorly designed as to be worthless, but his conclusion still has the ring of plausibility:

"When teaching and learning conditions are poor, we discovered that many teachers see their compensation as inadequate. When these teaching and learning conditions are good, not only do teachers tend to stay, they actually view their compensation as a reason for staying."

The findings suggest that when teachers unions advocate primarily for salary, they have it somewhat wrong. On the other hand, Futernick said, administrators are clearly misguided when they focus single-mindedly on getting rid of "bad teachers."

....At high-minority and high-poverty schools, teacher turnover typically runs at 10% annually. "If this churning is going on, you can be sure you have a dysfunctional school," Futernick said. "As long as we think of these schools as combat zones, we'll never solve the retention problem and we'll never close the achievement gap" between white and Asian students and their black and Latino peers.

That sounds about right. But complaining about low salaries and bad teachers is a lot easier than focusing on the seemingly intractable problem of dysfunctional communities creating dysfunctional schools. So that's what we do.

OFF WITH HER HEAD....I'm curious: what do people think about the MIT dean story? MIT officials recently discovered that Marilee Jones, their dean of admissions, lied on her resume 28 years ago and does not, in fact, have a college degree. So they fired her:"There are some mistakes people can make for which 'I'm sorry' can be accepted, but this is one of those matters where the lack of integrity is sufficient all by itself," [Chancellor Phillip] Clay said. "This is a very sad situation for her and for the institution. We have obviously placed a lot of trust in her."Needless to say, point taken. But isn't there also a point here about credentialism run amok? Everything I've read about this case suggests that Jones was not just a good dean of admissions, but something of a superstar dean of admissions. Given that, is the fact that she lied about her credentials three decades ago for an entry-level job really that big a deal?

Not being an academic myself, maybe I just don't realize how serious this situation is. But from my perch outside the academy, it's hard not to think that this didn't necessarily require the death penalty. Surely there was something MIT could have done to demonstrate it took this seriously without also losing a valued and high performing member of its administration?

UPDATE: Reaction in comments is virtually unanimous: I'm wrong. In fact, firing might have been too good for her....

DREAMS FROM MY FATHER....Alexander Konetzki is a liberal who decided to start his journalism career as an assistant editor at The American Conservative. It was an odd choice, to be sure, but apparently he made a pretty good go of it until a couple of months ago when the magazine finally published a piece that pushed him over the edge: a review of Barack Obama's Dreams From My Father written by noted race obsessive Steve Sailer. Konetzki tells his story in our current issue:

Even before I read the piece I knew I wouldn't like it. TAC's editor, who was pleased with Sailer's work, had told me as much. But I found the piece so offensive when I first read it that I jumped out of my chair and rushed into the managing editor's office to try to kill it on the spot. She and the editor promptly dismissed my objections. The piece is provocative, they said — it's edgy. It's racist, I said — and the magazine will be regarded as such for publishing it.

....The weekend after Kara and Scott dismissed my objections to Sailer's essay, I read Dreams From My Father....I arrived at the office on Monday....And when I went to her office with Obama's book in hand, asking again whether we could discuss things, she called across the hall to Scott, who said, "Yeah, look, Alexander, this matter has already been decided. The piece is being published as it is." I pointed out that I had read the book, and Sailer's characterization of Obama was factually incorrect. "I have too many other things to worry about," Scott said coldly. "Steve Sailer is a longtime friend of the magazine, and if you and he read a book differently, well, I'll take his reading over yours any day."

This got me curious. I had gotten a copy of Dreams From My Father for Christmas, so I sat down to read it. Then I read Sailer's essay, "Obama's Identity Crisis." So who's right?

In a word, Konetzki. Basically, Sailer argues that far from being a man who "transcends race," Obama, at least up through 1995, when Dreams was published, "found solace in nursing a pervasive sense of grievance and animosity against his mother's race" — i.e., white people. "Why was Obama so insistent upon rejecting the white race?" he asks.

This is, to put it mildly, a crock. Sailer tries to back up his thesis with a few carefully cherry-picked quotes, but even taken at face value all he shows is that Obama was occasionally either annoyed or angry with some of the actions of his white friend and relatives. And it's true. He was. But it's absurd to suggest that this demonstrates some kind of deep-seated animosity. I imagine a dark-skinned man growing up in America would have to be a saint to go through life without ever feeling that way.

None of which is to say that Obama wasn't confused and uncomfortable with his racial identity for much of his first three decades. In fact, that's the whole point of the book. What's more — and this is the part of Dreams I found most peculiar — it's never really clear why. In language that's often florid and overwrought, but also oddly artificial, he tells us how he feels, but the circumstances of his life are never drawn starkly enough to make it clear why he feels the way he does.

I don't know. Maybe it's because I'm white. Maybe African-American readers understand Obama's feelings without the need for lengthy explanation. Either way, though, the book makes it clear that Obama's racial angst mostly takes the form of trying to construct a workable black identity for himself. He's fascinated, as anyone would be, by the Kenyan father he met only once and the extended Kenyan family he's never met at all (his eventual trip to Kenya to meet them forms the final section of the book), and Sailer wants us to believe that this act of black identification automatically suggests a rejection of Obama's white heritage. Unfortunately, this says more about Sailer's state of mind than Obama's. There's simply nothing in the book to seriously back it up.

And then there's Sailer's conclusion, in which he hints that if Obama becomes president his youthful racial confusion might return, morphing him into an African-style "big man" dedicated to doling out goodies to the Urban League instead of governing as the levelheaded wonk we all think he is. This is almost a parody of Sailer's usual race obsession, and one that literally comes out of nowhere. Like the rest of the essay, Sailer would have been better off letting Konetzki take a very thick blue pencil to it.

"SLAM DUNK"....George Tenet says he's pissed off at whoever it was who leaked his "slam dunk" comment to Bob Woodward:

The phrase "slam dunk" didn't refer to whether Saddam Hussein actually had WMDs, says Tenet; the CIA thought he did. He says he was talking about what information could be used to make that case when he uttered those words. "We can put a better case together for a public case. That's what I meant," explains Tenet.

....He says he doesn't know who leaked it but says there were only a handful of people in the room.

"It's the most despicable thing that ever happened to me," Tenet says. "You don't do this. You don't throw somebody overboard just because it's a deflection. Is that honorable? It's not honorable to me."

Well....color me unconvinced. Given a couple of years to think it over, that's probably the kind of story I'd come up with too, but I think I'd try to make it more believable. Frankly, the table-pounding declaration that something is a "slam dunk" doesn't really sound like the kind of thing you'd say if you were merely agreeing that your PowerPoint presentation could use some sprucing up, does it?

But who knows. Maybe that really is the way Tenet talks. As for his belated discovery that the Bush White House doesn't always behave in honorable ways, all I can say is: I hope Tenet's take on foreign leaders was more insightful than his take on his own boss. The fact that loyalty is a one-way street with Bush the Younger is not exactly the news of the century.

PRETTY FOR THE CAMERAS....Jim Henley vents a bit about the John Edwards haircut fiasco:

You know, if we had reporters in this country, they could actually find out the hair-care costs for all the candidates rather than just assuming that the one barbering bill that has come to light is unusual. If reporters want to huff that such work is beneath them, I'll have to demand that they give me a break, by taking hostages if necessary. Not only is nothing beneath them, as they have repeatedly shown, it's absurd to argue implicitly that candidate hair care costs are a big deal if the story happens to fall into your lap, but not a big enough deal to do actual work on.

Well, I don't have the energy to do anything that close to real reporting, but I do know how much George Bush paid to have his face made up for TV appearances during the 2000 campaign. Or, rather, Stephanie Mencimer knows. Details here.

BANANA REPUBLICANS....CONTINUED....The Washington Post reports today that White House political officials conducted "20 private briefings on Republican electoral prospects in the last midterm election for senior officials in at least 15 government agencies." The only one of these briefings we know anything about is one given at the GSA last year:

In the GSA briefing — conducted like all the others by a deputy to chief White House political adviser Karl Rove — two slides were presented showing 20 House Democrats targeted for defeat and several dozen vulnerable Republicans.

At its completion, GSA Administrator Lurita Alexis Doan asked how GSA projects could be used to help "our candidates," according to half a dozen witnesses. The briefer, J. Scott Jennings, said that topic should be discussed "off-line," the witnesses said. Doan then replied, "Oh, good, at least as long as we are going to follow up," according to an account given by former GSA chief acquisition officer Emily Murphy to House investigators, according to a copy of the transcript.

And what about all the other briefings? The Post reports the Stepford-like answer: "By the end of yesterday afternoon, all of those describing the briefings on the record had adopted a uniform phrase in response to a reporter's inquiries: They were, each official said, 'informational briefings about the political landscape.'"

Informational briefings! With specific information about, among other things, which particular Republicans in which particular districts in which particular states were in the most trouble. Right before an election. You betcha.

But you never know. Maybe it's just a wild coincidence that the only meeting we actually know anything about included conversations about how to help "our candidates." Maybe the rest of them really were just "informational." And maybe OJ really is innocent.

AL-QAEDA IN IRAQ....Andrew Sullivan makes the prosaic point this morning that we are "occupying a sovereign Muslim country indefinitely, against the wishes of a clear majority of Iraqis," a project with little chance of success and considerable chance of creating ever more problems as long as it continues. Then he makes a followup argument that gets surprisingly little air time:

So we should leave. Soon. Let the Shia and tribal leaders and the Kurds confront al Qaeda. It's about time they did. And they have as good a reason as we do and far better knowledge of the enemy and the terrain. Until they own this war against Islamist terror, it won't be won. And by continuing to stay, we postpone the day when they have to fight for their own country and their own religion — and win the war we cannot win for them.

Does anyone really doubt this? Putting aside questions about whether al-Qaeda in Iraq is really al-Qaeda — or merely a new name for the most extreme fringe of a nationalist insurgency — surely the best way to crush them is to leave. They are unloved by practically everybody, they draw their strength mainly from our continuing presence, and Iraqi security forces would likely decimate them if they were left to their own devices.

Yes, AQI's demise would come only at the end of a lengthy and brutal war, but how much worse is that than coming at the end of an even lengthier war run by the United States? Or perhaps not coming at all because this isn't the kind of war the United States military can fight effectively? Isn't it time to face up to this?

IRAN UPDATE....Via Dan Drezner, Time's Tony Karon reports some modestly encouraging news on the Iran front:

A senior former Iranian diplomat was reported Tuesday as revealing that [Iranian nuclear negotiator Ali] Larijani had been given "authority for compromise" by Iran's Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. As Iran's leaders reportedly grow increasingly concerned about a confrontation with the U.S. and subjecting their troubled economy to the added pressure of sanctions, the search for a formula that would allow both sides to stand down has become more urgent.

....The U.S. had originally insisted that Iran could not be allowed to keep any enrichment facilities on its own soil, but it is now being reported that Solana may offer a deal in which Iran would keep its current small-scale enrichment research facility, although not actually run it, for now. Reports suggest that the U.S. will push for the Natanz facility to revert to "cold standby," i.e. turning off but not dismantling the centrifuges, whereas Iran would counter that they be kept spinning, although empty of uranium.

The very fact that the negotiations are focused on such details of a mutually acceptable formula for defining what is meant by "suspension" of Iran's activities suggests that the current trend in the nuclear talks is towards compromise, rather than confrontation.

Stay tuned. This sounds fairly speculative, but still better than anything we've heard before. Maybe a deal can be struck after all.

WINNING THE WAR....In a recent PIPA poll of four majority-Muslim countries (Morocco, Egypt, Pakistan, and Indonesia), 10% of the respondents said they approved of terrorist attacks on civilian targets. Question: is this good news or bad? 10% is a pretty small number, all things considered, but at the same time, it's way more than enough to keep al-Qaeda supplied with foot soldiers for a long, long time.

These other results, however, are unreservedly bad news:

• 75% have an unfavorable view of the U.S. government.
  

• 79% think one of the goals of U.S. foreign policy is to weaken and divide the Islamic world.
  

• Only 16% think the primary goal of the war on terror is to protect the U.S. from attack.
  

• Only 24% think the U.S. is committed to the creation of a Palestinian state.
  

• Only 23% believe al-Qaeda was behind the 9/11 attacks.
  

Here's the problem: At best, we're never going to manage to do more than tread water in the war on terror/jihad/extremism/whatever as long as the Muslim public so overwhelmingly holds these beliefs. Unfortunately, although the Muslim attachment to a deeply illiberal culture is real and needs to be faced squarely, changing Islamic public opinion isn't a matter of merely overcoming some kind of mass delusion. After all, with the exception of the last bullet, these are all pretty defensible beliefs.

So here are some questions for every one of the 2008 presidential candidates: Do you care about Muslim public opinion? Do you think it impacts U.S. national security? Which aspects of American foreign policy do you think contribute to these attitudes? What concrete steps would you take to change these parts of our foreign policy? Aside from making jokes about bombing Iran, that is. There will be an open book test on January 20, 2009.

Marc Lynch has more here ("the al-Qaeda worldview — of a world divided between clashing civilizations and Islam under a comprehensive assault from the West — seems widely spread and increasingly entrenched"). The full PIPA report is here.

BLIND QUOTES....David Ignatius calls for a mission into the heart of darkness:

If you want to hear despair in Washington these days, talk to Republicans...."This is the most incompetent White House I've seen since I came to Washington," said one GOP senator.

[Etc. etc.]

When a presidency is as severely damaged as this one, the normal drill is to empower a strong and politically adept White House chief of staff to make the necessary changes....The current White House chief of staff, Josh Bolten, needs to mount a similar salvage mission, argue several prominent Republicans. They question whether he's politically adept enough. But most of all, they question whether Bolten or anyone else can break through Bush's tight, tough shell and tell him the truth. What's starting to crack isn't the obdurate Bush, but the country.

Politically adept? Bush may have lots of problems with the Hill, as Ignatius documents, but let's face it: this is all about Iraq, and there's no chief of staff in the world who's going to change Bush's mind on that. Until Republicans themselves stop hiding behind blind quotes and start going public with the plain truth themselves, there's no point in pretending that Josh Bolten can do it for them.

GOODLING GETS IMMUNITY....Excellent. I see that the House Judiciary Committee has voted to grant immunity to Monica "Fifth Amendment" Goodling so that she can testify under oath about Purgegate. Even a majority of the Republicans on the committee voted in favor.

Good for them. Goodling's refusal to testify has never seemed to be so much about genuine Fifth Amendment concerns as it was about the fact that she simply didn't think she should have to face tough questioning from a hostile panel. Unfortunately, the law doesn't say anything about that. It's time to get her under oath.

BUYING THE WAR....PBS's Bill Moyers Journal is returning to the air tonight with a 90-minute broadcast called "Buying the War." It sounds well worth watching, and I especially want to highlight this:

Among the few heroes of this devastating film are reporters with the Knight Ridder/McClatchy bureau in D.C. Tragically late, Walter Isaacson, who headed CNN, observes, "The people at Knight Ridder were calling the colonels and the lieutenants and the people in the CIA and finding out, you know, that the intelligence is not very good. We should've all been doing that."

This is something that's common knowledge in the blogosphere, where Knight Ridder (now McClatchy) has been a daily must-read for years. Their DC and Baghdad bureaus don't have the breadth of coverage of, say, the New York Times, but the stuff they do cover is almost always top notch. And their coverage of Iraq has been easily the most acute and prescient of any news organization. They well deserve being singled out on tonight's show.

You can check local showtimes for "Buying the War" here. Definitely worth a look.

LETTING RUDY WIN....Yesterday Rudy Giuliani said the country would be safer if it elects a Republican in 2008 — especially if that Republican is him:

"If any Republican is elected president — and I think obviously I would be the best at this — we will remain on offense....I listen a little to the Democrats and if one of them gets elected, we are going on defense," Giuliani continued. "We will wave the white flag on Iraq. We will cut back on the Patriot Act, electronic surveillance, interrogation and we will be back to our pre-Sept. 11 attitude of defense."

He added: "The Democrats do not understand the full nature and scope of the terrorist war against us."

My reaction: Yawn. Of course Rudy thinks the country would be safer with a Republican in charge. Presumably he also thinks the economy will do better, crime will come down, and everyone will have whiter teeth. If he didn't, he wouldn't be a Republican.

So I was curious: how would the Dem candidates respond? With the usual whining? Or with something smart? Greg Sargent has today's responses from Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton over at his site and the verdict is in: more whining. Obama: "Rudy Giuliani today has taken the politics of fear to a new low blah blah blah." Clinton: "One of the great tragedies of this Administration is that the President failed to keep this country unified after 9/11 yada yada yada."

Unbelievable. Neither one of them took the chance to do what Rudy did: explain in a few short sentences why the country would be safer with a Democrat in the Oval Office. Is it really that hard? Giuliani's position is clear: more war, more domestic surveillance, more torture, and fewer civil liberties. And while it's true that the liberal position on making America secure is a little more complicated than the schoolyard version of foreign affairs beloved of Bush-era Republicans, it's not that complicated. So instead of complaining about how mean Giuliani is, why can't Obama and Clinton just tell us what they'd do?

Whining just reinforces the message that Democrats are wimps. The real way to be "hard hitting" is to explain why Giuliani is wrong and what Democrats would do instead — and why the average Joe and Jane would be safer and better off without guys like Giuliani bumbling recklessly around the globe leaving a stronger al-Qaeda and a weaker America in their wake. Until they do, Rudy and the Republicans are going to win every round of this fight.

UPDATE: This response from the DNC isn't what I was after, but at least it's a decent attack on Giuliani. That's a start, I guess.

THE UPSTART....Is trade policy the "single biggest fault line in today's Democratic Party"? That's what Zack Roth says in the current issue of the Monthly, and he suggests that up-and-comer Tim Ryan, a favorite of the netroots, is just the guy to bridge the divide. Ryan, who represents Ohio's blue-collar 17th district, may be a solid favorite of organized labor (he recently cosponsored a tariff bill aimed at Chinese imports), but it turns out he's also a big fan of Alvin Toffler and the knowledge economy:

That Ryan finds himself claimed as an ally by both sides of the trade divide is more than just clever political positioning. His approach may represent where the party, and the country, is ultimately heading on the issue. Younger people appear far more willing than their elders to acknowledge, as Ryan does, that America can't wall itself off from the global economy. In a recent poll, 41 percent of respondents aged eighteen to thirty-four agreed that free trade deals help the United States. Among respondents fifty and over, that figure was just 18 percent. "Younger people didn't fully live as adults in the world as it used to be," says Lori Kl