I’m taking a break. See you on the other side.

[picture removed]

Ezra Klein’s latest attempt to lay blame for the war in Iraq won’t wash:

Lots of people, ranging from Paul Wolfowitz to Paul Wellstone, believed Iraq had chemical and biological weapons, and a far-from-completion nuclear program. The difference came in how you imagined the war would go, how difficult, and bloody, and expensive, and long, it would be. You could convince the American people, particularly after our illusory win in Afghanistan, that a short victory would be good all around. But no one would have signed up for this mess. And that’s where we needed our analysts to interject a dose of reality, a grounded take on how hard this would be, not a heap best-case, wishful thinking. And they failed us.

It pains me to have to remind the young Mr. Klein that people are responsible for their own “doses of reality.” If they fail to inform themselves—especially in a country where we can find things out for ourselves, where we have all the information available to us at the click of a mouse—it isn’t the fault of the many marketers (from every walk of life, not just politics) who are endlessly trying to sell us stuff, including ideas and images.

Don’t blame others for the fantasies that you believe in.

And while you’re at it, try to avoid denial, too.

Faced with the high odor of real perfidy [which leaves them unable simply to deny the truth], people unwilling to risk a break skew their perception of reality much more purposefully. One common way to do this is to recast clear moral breaches as foul-ups, stumbles or lapses in competence — because those are more tolerable, said Dr. Kim, of U.S.C. In effect, Dr. Kim said, people “reframe the ethical violation as a competence violation.”

She wasn’t cheating on him — she strayed. He didn’t hide the losses in the subprime mortgage unit for years — he miscalculated.

Klein doesn’t want to accuse liberal hawks like Ken Pollack of an ethical violation. He wants to cut them a break. He is still blaming them, not himself, and is barking up the wrong tree. He is still in denial.

Back in the 1960s, we seemed to understand that war is … war: not healthy for children and other living things.

Alan Dershowitz says Harvard profs are quaking in their boots:

At Harvard, hard-left radicals, led by Professor J. Lorand Matory ’82, claim that they are being muzzled. At last week’s Faculty meeting, Matory alleged that critics of Israel like him “tremble in fear” when they express their views at Harvard. He submitted a motion to resolve that “this Faculty commits itself to fostering civil dialogue in which people with a broad range of perspectives feel safe and are encouraged to express their reasoned and evidence-based ideas.”

Hey, I encourage Matory and his colleagues to express their not-reasoned and evidence-less ideas, too. It’s a free country! The First Amendment is their permit! Meanwhile, the rest of us have rights, too—including the right not to believe even the esteemed professors’ most “reasoned” and “evidence-based” ideas.

Oh, and Dershowitz has some reassuring words too [emphasis in original]:

Freedom of speech to criticize Israel and the U.S. is alive and well at Harvard and most other universities. Matory need not “tremble in fear” of anything except his pernicious opinions being rebutted in the marketplace of ideas.

Sunlight is the best disinfectant—in universities too.

The Politico notes that the political campaigns are all revved up:

The presidential campaigns in both parties have begun reacting ferociously to real or perceived attacks from rivals, goaded by a tight campaign calendar that leaves no room for error, and a determination to show they’re tougher than John F. Kerry was in 2004.

All of the candidates have sought to exploit any whiff of negativity from their opponents by pivoting off the charges with counterattacks designed to gain sympathy or political advantage within their own party.

This is yet more evidence, for those who need it, for the validity of the Feiler Faster Thesis, in which Mickey Kaus was making an observation about momentum in politics. He suggested that with the speeding up of everything in our everyday life,

there are now simply more opportunities for turns of fortune and that voters are able, for the most part, to keep up. …

 ”The FFT, remember, doesn’t say that information moves with breathtaking speed these days. (Everyone knows that!) The FFT says that people are comfortable processing that information with what seems like breathtaking speed.” [e.a.]

Campaigns are responding rapidly to attacks because they are trying to turn every moment in the spotlight—even (perhaps especially) moments of crisis—into an opportunity. They have learned the hard way that unless you answer every attack, you leave yourself open to the possibility that your opponent’s displeasing narrative about you, or his attack on your image, will stick to you.

Rapid response is about upping the ante, about fighting bad PR with better PR in the hope that you will accrue an image of yourself appealing enough for voters to cast their ballot for you. What’s amazing about it is that politicians do this even though most voters aren’t even paying attention. They just cannot afford to stand still as the river of news*** rushes by them.

——————-

*** Doc Searls recently elaborated this concept. I’m still trying to process it. Totally fascinating stuff:

Here’s the problem with most news: it isn’t. It’s olds. It happened hours ago, or last night, or yesterday, or last month, or before whenever the deadline was in the news organization’s current “news cycle”. It’s not now. …

News is a river, not a lake. It is active, not static. It’s what’s happening, not what happened. Or not only what happened.

But what happened — news as olds — is how we’ve understood news for as long as we’ve had newspapers. The happening kind of news came along with radio, and then television. Then we called it “live”. Still, even on the nightly news, what’s live is talking heads and reports from the field. The rest is finished stuff.

There’s a difference here, a distinction to be made: one as stark and important as the distinction between now and then, or life and death. It’s a distinction between what’s live and what’s not.

This distinction is what will have us soon talking about the life of newspapers, rather than the death of them.

Because it’s not enough to be “online” or to have a “presence” on the Web.

To be truly alive, truly new, truly part of the life of its readers, a newspaper needs to be on the live web and not just the static one. It needs to flow news, and not just post it.

It needs to flow rivers of news, or newsrivers.