Brackets Set

This primary tournament schedule is far from perfect, because anyone eliminated in an early primary will not have a chance to regroup in later polls (Edwards in South Carolina, for instance). Well tough shit. No one gets a day off in the playoffs.

I've excluded some less significant primaries. No offense to Nevada or Wyoming, for instance; you just don't count as much. And this round ends after Super Tuesday. We'll configure the rest later. Please excuse the spacing issue for the four rounds. It turns out I'm not bright enough to correct it yet. Technical crews--Brian, that means you--are assessing the problem now. (Jan. 14, Iowa; Jan. 22, NH; Jan. 29/Feb. 2, SC; Feb. 5, 20+ others)

Democrats Jan. 14 Jan. 22 Jan. 29 Feb. 5

1. Hillary Clinton
8. Mike Gravel

4. Bill Richardson
5. Joe Biden

3. John Edwards
6. Chris Dodd

2. Barrack Obama
7. Dennis Kucinich

Republicans Jan. 14 Jan. 22 Feb. 2 Feb. 5

1. Rudy Giuliani
8. Tom Tancredo/
Duncan Hunter*

4. Mitt Romney
5. Mike Huckabee

3. John McCain
6. Ron Paul

2. Fred Thompson
7. Sam Brownback

*The play-in game. Better showing of two will count.

Early analysis: Clinton is the tournament's overall no. 1 seed, and she looks to cruise through the early rounds. No no. 8 seed has ever won, and this year doesn't promise to be any different. Expect a heated contest on Jan. 22 in New Hampshire between Edwards and Obama.

On the Republican side, there was some grumbling from the Romney camp that McCain earned a higher seeding despite conflicting recent poll results. But the Arizona senator got the slight edge, experts say, because of his experience at this level. Aides also whispered that if Romney can't out-handsome Giuliani, then he doesn't belong in this race anyway. Thompson will get an early test from McCain in NH; Giuliani, meanwhile, could have his conservative credentials severely challenged in South Carolina on Feb. 2, a few days after democrats square off in the same state.

Don't Mind the Alarm

A man by the name of Richard Sypher posted the following comment to a NYTimes message board about Al Gore winning the Nobel Peace Prize:

"The Nobel committee continues its record of rewarding left-wing alarmists."

Stop me if I'm crazy, but since when is being an "alarmist" in world politics a bad thing? Even if the case for global warming is totally overblown, is it so wrong for Gore to bring our attention to it? Besides, Al Gore was famously one of the first public figures to sound the alarm against the Iraq War way back in 2002. That was certainly "alarmist." And it was right on.

So what's the complaint?

Another Nobel Prize, in Literature, was awarded to Doris Lessing yesterday in Literature. She seems to be almost on her deathbed. For God's sake, her SON is on his deathbed. There is very little chance that Doris Lessing will make another big contribution to the arts before she passes away. But the Peace Prize, as I understand it, is often given to people who still have a chance to make a big impact on the global stage. Look at Muhammad Yunus, who won last year's Prize for his microloan banks in developing countries. The Nobel Peace Prize is significant BECAUSE it draws our attention to issues that need to be addressed now and in the future. You might say it was designed to be given to "alarmists."

Do you ever get the feeling, Karl, that railing against "alarmists" and "activists" and the other comical villains of the left wing is akin to the "stop snitching" campaign that bullies people into staying quiet when their neighbor is shot in the face during a drug deal?

Primary Madness

Brian, you've inspired me with this Fantasy Campaign idea--except I'm distorting it a bit to give us more of a head-to-head feel and all the tension of match-ups and good, dishonest competition. So I'm putting together brackets for both Republican and Democratic primaries in the spirit of NCAA March Madness. We'll have seedings (based on money raised and position in early polls) pitting the candidates against each other, and we'll see who advances and who gets cut from the presidential race. If the numbers are uneven, we might give a bye to top horses in each party. We can print off our brackets, make our picks, and bet loads of money on the outcome; why let the campaigns have all the fun?

I'm thinking we might need to powwow on figuring out seeding and such. But I'd like to have brackets available within a week or two.

Fantasy Presidential Campaign '08

When all is said and done, this will be the longest and most expensive presidential race in American history. So why aren't we learning more about the candidates? Right now they're all running on a platform of personality. We've learned more about their biographies than their policies. For those of us who care about more than just a candidate's skin color, gender, and home state, it's not a very effective way to run a campaign.

So I'll propose a solution: Fantasy Presidential Campaign.

We make a note of each time a candidate stands FOR or AGAINST some policy that's being implemented in the US, and a few months later we decide whether it was a good call. Over time we'll have a statistical record of how well each candidate's fantasy policies would have fared. It's like seeing each candidate would run the country for the two years leading up to the election. For example, Joe Biden was advocating a partitioning of Iraq a long time ago. If we had made a note of it then, his stance would have started looking better over time, as more people are getting on board. Points for Biden. When all the statistics are thrown together we'll have a scientifically infallible answer to the question of Campaign '08.

(Yes, I guess we're always supposed to be keeping track of the candidate's positions and holding them accountable, but it would be really helpful for me if someone would put it all in bracket form. Karl, I'm looking at you.)

Outsourcing the Trigger

Is anyone else uncomfortable with the way the media has flip-flopped on its portrayal of Blackwater USA?

The top story at The New York Times begins like this:

"BAGHDAD, Oct. 2 — It started out as a family errand: Ahmed Haithem Ahmed was driving his mother, Mohassin, to pick up his father from the hospital where he worked as a pathologist... Moments later a bullet tore through Mr. Ahmed’s head, he slumped, and the car rolled forward. Then Blackwater guards responded with a barrage of gunfire and explosive weapons, leaving 17 dead and 24 wounded."

The Blackwater story is turning into a schlocky horror movie, and the media is filming it through the eyes of a mad serial killer named--gasp--America.

But three years ago, when four Blackwater agents were killed, mutilated, and dragged through he streets of Fallujah, The New York Times framed it as a conflict between a horde of bloodthirsty Iraqis and the staunch resolve of the White House Press Secretary. According to the Times, the streets of Fallujah were:

"thick with men and boys and chaos. Men with scarves over their faces hurled bricks into the blazing vehicles. A group of boys yanked a smoldering body into the street and ripped it apart. Someone then tied a chunk of flesh to a rock and tossed it over a telephone wire.... 'Falluja is the graveyard of Americans!' they chanted."

All of this may be true, but The New York Times didn't even bother to cover the whole story. They described the four dead Americans as simply "civilians, who worked for a North Carolina company." The word "Blackwater" didn't appear until later in their coverage. And they seemed to feign ignorance as to what our civilian contractors were doing in Iraq in the first place:

"It is not clear what the four Americans were doing in Falluja or where they were going. But just as they were passing a strip of stationery stores and kebab shops around 10:30 a.m., masked gunmen jumped into the street and blasted their vehicles with assault rifles. Witnesses said the civilians did not shoot back."

Compare this to the story The New York Times is running about Blackwater today, and it's like we've switched killers at the climax of a horror movie.

Don't get me wrong. I have a feeling those Blackwater guys are a bunch of gun-toting assholes, and I'm sure they've killed civilians. But we hired them to serve as the paramilitary wing of the US Army during a war. (Like the paramilitaries in Colombia a few years ago, who were hired by wealthy Colombians to torch the rebels' homes and massacre entire villages, since the government wasn't allowed to be so reckless.) How can we put Blackwater on trial for doing what we asked of them? If we didn't want them killing civilians, we should have used our own soldiers to protect our State Department convoys from the very beginning. And then it would have been US soldiers killing civilians, instead of a North Carolina company. Guess what? The whole war is fucked.

Joe Pesci. Historical Fiction. New England Corpses.

Karl I want to add something to your post about John McCain and our "Christian nation."

Doesn't this remind you of the whole concept of "activist judges" who are willfully interpreting the Constitution instead of sticking to what the Founding Fathers intended? That whole idea has always sounded like bullshit to me. Are we supposed to ignore 300+ years of adapting our country to the challenges it has faced, and live like foppy Englishmen with teacups and tailcoats? McCain is basically making the same argument here. Whatever we started out as--that's exactly how we should be today. We, the public, are supposed to remain oblivious to the fact that this sort of "strict interpretation" of our nation's history is always used to enact controversial policies in the present. Like the Supreme Court justices who are rolling back our individual freedoms on the basis of what was said (or not said) in the 18th century. In the case of John McCain, we have a presidential candidate who wants to say that America's next leader should be a regular old white guy with traditional beliefs about God and the afterlife. (Kind of the lowest common denominator candidate, like G. W. Bush was, huh?) But that would be an inflammatory statement. So where does McCain turn for a handy argument? "History."

Yesterday I was talking to Carolyn "Foxie" about novels and historical fiction. Why does a writer choose to set a work of fiction in the past? Say, for example, you're writing a love story about a grocery store clerk and the man who loves her all his life, even though he's in prison for fifty years, convicted of a crime he didn't commit. A lot of writers would choose to set that story in an evocative time and place--like Missouri in the 1930s, or New York City in the 1970s, or Russia in the 1890s. Anytime, anywhere. But no matter how much research you do for the book, it's always going to reflect a present-day sensibility. In the language and the character's dilemmas and values espoused and the level of detail, it will always be a novel about the year 2007.

I would like to direct your attention to Joe Pesci. In the movie "With Honors" he played an erudite bum named Simon Wilder who basically ends the film with this speech to a Harvard professor: "Crude? No, sir. Our "founding parents" were pompous, white, middle-aged farmers, but they were also great men. Because they knew one thing that all great men should know: that they didn't know everything. Sure, they'd make mistakes, but they made sure to leave a way to correct them. The president is not an "elected king," no matter how many bombs he can drop. Because the "crude" Constitution doesn't trust him. He's just a bum, okay Mr. Pitkannan? He's just a bum."

I love that. I want to live in a country where we realize that we don't always have the right answers, but we make provisions to adapt and fix things as the world changes. We are not beholden to the past for its own sake. That is the America where I want to live.

Anyway, we're talking about John McCain's statement, and here is my question for you, Karl, and for all of our gentle readers (numerous and perceptive as they are). What do we owe the past? Because I don't want to throw it out entirely. In fact, history is often the best way to project our possible actions into the future and decide on a course of action. But we certainly can't go around with a "strict interpretation" of the Constitution and the "Christian principles" of the men who founded us. (Need I mention that those men are currently nothing but a hunk of water and blood and bone in a wooden casket on a grassy hillside in New England?) When is it appropriate to let our decisions be guided by the past?

Dear God, please don't make a Muslim president. Love, John

"I just have to say in all candor that since this nation was founded primarily on Christian principles, personally, I prefer someone who has a grounding in my faith," said Sen. John McCain in an interview with Beliefnet. That was a relief to voters who worried McCain might have been growing a little too reckless with his open-mindedness.

Jill Hazelbaker, McCain's communication director, later stressed that McCain's comments were in no way inflammatory. "Read in context," she said, "his interview with Beliefnet makes clear that people of all faiths are entitled to all the rights protected by the Constitution, including the right to practice their religion freely." Uh, they just shouldn't be president.