The next big thing!

Soon to take the Irish trad world by storm: Glór na mBan!

. . .

Okay, yes, I'm plugging people I know (at least one or two of them). But we're talking about fine musicians, so I do it with my head held high! Now all there is to do is wait for the promised higher quality sound files, and trust that the world will shortly be a brighter, better place.

[Try not to hold the Spice Girls line against them, by the way. To the best of my knowledge, not a single member of the group is planning to run off with David Beckham.]

`Nuff said.

Where were you in `79?

If you're the new president of Iran, it looks like you might've been getting your thug on.

At least four former hostages said they had little doubt that the two [Ahmadinejad and an anonymous hostage taker in Tehran in 1979] were the same. Some of them said they remembered the man as having been in a supervisory capacity.

Donald Sharer, of Bedford, Ind., told NBC that he was virtually certain that Mr. Ahmadinejad was the same man. He said he had been reading the Indianapolis Star recently and saw a recent picture of the president-elect.

"All of a sudden, up pops the devil, right in front of me," he said.

Mr. Sharer said he remembered, while being held in Tehran's notorious Evin prison, having the man he believes now to be Mr. Ahmadinejad come in and berate the prisoners as "pigs and dogs" in a way that left him fearing for his life.

"You tend not to forget people that put your life in threat," he said.

On a scale of 1 to 10, he told the interviewer, he would rate his certainty level at 9.9.

Another former hostage, William Daugherty, said on CNN, "I saw his picture in the Washington Post Saturday morning, and recognized it immediately."

While at least one other former hostage, Thomas Schaefer, a retired air force colonel, said he could not confidently place Mr. Ahmadinejad, Mr. Daugherty said the face was one he would never forget.

"When your country is being humiliated and being embarrassed, the individuals that do that really stick in your mind," he said. "You don't forget people who do things like that to you and your family and your country."

In a news photo from 1979 showing radicals escorting a blindfolded American hostage, one man does appear strikingly similar to Mr. Ahmadinejad. Both have heads that seem unusually broad at the top, narrowing to pointed, bearded chins. Both have distinctive flops of dark hair over the brow.

The Washington Times, a conservative daily that bannered the story across its front pagetoday, quoted another former hostage, Charles Scott, as reacting much like Mr. Sharer and Mr. Daugherty.

"He was one of the top two or three leaders," Mr. Scott, 73, a retired army colonel in Jonesboro, Ga., told the newspaper. "The new president of Iran is a terrorist."

Even if this is true, it's been more than a quarter of a century - pragmatically, it's his current politics that should be making the world uncomfortable. I also don't understand why he would be hiding his role in the events; known participants in the embassy drama have been successful in Iranian politics without obscuring their identities, after all.

That said, we've got an awful lot of witnesses here, and I don't see any particular reason to believe that they have less credibility than the Iranian government - quite the opposite. And if this turns out to be true, particularly after a haze of official denials, Mr. Ahmadinejad is going to have even less leverage on the international stage than his prominent place in a bad system would have earned him. Particularly with the United States.

Will contemporary bioethics survive elderly baby boomers?

You tell me.

Stem cells were injected into elderly cows -- animals whose age was equivalent to an 80-year-old human. Tests showed boosted immune systems and rejuvenated blood vessels more than a year after an injection of a tablespoonful of stem cells taken from cloned bovine fetuses.

From Wired.

Twenty bucks says the promise of extended lifespans is going to radically change a lot of working conceptions of early pre-natal development (if only for expediency's sake). Fifty years from now, the argument that a cloned bastula is a separate entity from its donor is going to sound sentimental and uninformed to the public ear . . . .

Idiots at bat.

I can't link directly to the article (featured in Roll Call, and largely reprinted here), but . . . well, it seems that George Soros is looking to buy into the Washington Nationals - that's the local baseball team, for any extranational readers.

The immediate consequences?

While the Soros-Ledecky group is not seen as the frontrunner to win the bidding for the Nationals, who should be awarded to their new owner at the end of the 2005 season, the very prospect that Soros could have a stake in the team is enough to irritate Congressional Republicans.

"I think Major League Baseball understands the stakes," said Government Reform Chairman Tom Davis (R), the Northern Virginia lawmaker who recently convened high-profile steroid hearings. "I don't think they want to get involved in a political fight."

Davis, whose panel also oversees District of Columbia issues, said that if a Soros sale went through, "I don't think it's the Nats that get hurt. I think it's Major League Baseball that gets hurt. They enjoy all sorts of exemptions" from anti-trust laws.

Indeed, Hill Republicans could potentially make life difficult for MLB in a variety of ways. In addition to being exempt from anti-trust rules, baseball is still under scrutiny over the steroid issue. The Nats, meanwhile, hope to have a publicly-funded stadium built soon, though money for that venture is expected to come through the sale of bonds rather than a federal outlay.

Still, Rep. John Sweeney (R-N.Y.), vice chairman of the Appropriations subcommittee that covers the District of Columbia budget, said if Soros buys the team and seeks public funding for the new stadium or anything else, the GOP attitude would be, "Let him pay for it."

"We're not going to interfere with [the sale], but from a fan's perspective, who needs the politics?" Sweeney said.

Another senior Republican lawmaker who requested anonymity said that the league should be aware of the perception problem that might be associated with selling the Nats to Soros.

"Why would Major League Baseball want to get involved with George Soros?" said the lawmaker. "It's about more than just the sale price."

. . .

What the hell is wrong with these people?

A Brit apologizes.

A noble gesture from Rich Johnston!

. . .

I can only assume he'll retract it once Dukes of Hazzard makes it overseas.

A year already?

For Shane Glines's Cartoonretro, that is. I've been paying five bucks a month since at least the first week of the site, and I don't regret a penny of it - not only is Shane himself a nice guy who deserves the opportunity to eat, but the archive of mid-century cartooning is pretty much unique, constantly expanding, and comes in about eighty distinct flavors of wonderful. [Don't believe me? There is, in fact, a free tour for the curious but frugal.]

So, congratulations, Shane!

. . .

Can we have some Bob GOMP now? Please?

Early prospects for the Supreme Court.

Over the past few days I've come across a couple of pieces on likely nominees to the bench in the event of Chief Justice Rehnquist's retirement (supposed by many to be scheduled for announcement this week). Slate has put up capsule commentary on some of the favored names - I'm not even going to try to get a firm command of the details now, but it's a link to which I expect to return when the nomination is officially made. Same goes for this A.P. piece. The L.A. Times, meanwhile, has put together a more conventional article on the subject, complete with nominal insiders making bets whose merits we can't know.

According to the Boston Globe, we can expect a lot of noise from within the Republican Party, however it plays out.

Evangelical attacks on judges over the Terri Schiavo feeding tube case backfired on Republicans, polls taken in the spring indicated. Now, many conservatives fear the religious right could hurt the party's cause by using faith-based arguments about abortion, same-sex marriage, and the separation of church and state to promote a Supreme Court nominee.

Instead, many Republican lawyers with close ties to the White House are determined to present such a nominee to the country in the religiously neutral terms Bush used in last year's campaign: as a judge who ''knows the difference between personal opinion and strict interpretation of the law."

''We should be looking for outstanding jurists, not ministers," said Victoria Toensing, a Justice Department official in the Reagan administration.

But grass-roots evangelicals, frustrated by GOP-appointed judges who have not overturned the Roe v. Wade abortion ruling, say they've learned their lesson from past Republican Supreme Court appointments David H. Souter, Anthony Kennedy, and Sandra Day O'Connor. They said they will demand clear positions from any conservative nominee.

''I've got an e-mail list of 150,000 grass-roots activists, and as soon as the president nominates somebody they're going to want the first e-mail from me to be everything I know about how good this individual is likely to be on the values issues these people care about," said Gary Bauer, a longtime standard-bearer for the religious right.

Compared to the 2004 Republican Convention, when party leaders kept evangelicals off the air during primetime broadcasts, Bauer said, a Supreme Court fight is ''too big" to ''micromanage." He vowed to speak out about a nominee's willingness to overturn abortion rights and same-sex marriage.

The Democrats want some say, too, but that's probably not in the cards.

Anyway, prepare to hear a lot more about this shit - little of it constructive. Multi-million dollar war chests are already arrayed for the campaign.

Ugh.

Tan Dun at the Met, baby!

Actually, I'm reflexively wary of composers whose works "contain sounds that many have never before realized could be music" - though my mother would probably argue that every Rush song that flooded our house in my teenage years would indicate otherwise - but this news fascinates me. I'm not well acquainted with his non-commercial work, but Mr. Tan's soundtracks spend a lot of time on autorepeat at the Long Wall; I've got a certain respect for the man's ability to wed music to narrative right off the bat. A proper, larger-than-life opera could be really interesting.

Just for the record . . . .

What do you get when you cross an iMac with a dragon?

Speeds of up to 405 kilometers per hour!

For my fellow Euro-wonk dilettantes.

There's a nifty exchange between Ivo Daalder (a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and formerly a staffer on President Clinton's NSC) and Jolyon Howorth (a big gun from the University of Bath currently serving as a visiting professor at Yale) on the consequences of the French and Dutch referenda for Europe as a whole. In brief: Mr. Daalder has previously argued that an early end to the expansionist phase of the European Union was likely to lead to a collapse in the extraordinary democratization efforts on Europe's peripheries - and to a greater risk of the sorts of carnage from which the continent has been trying to emerge for the last half-century; Mr. Howorth chimes in to say that that's a bit of an overreaction. Tempers flare! Vigorous beatings are administered!

. . .

Well, no. But it's interesting stuff . . . if you're the sort of person who finds that stuff interesting.

The Iranian presidency was useless to a reformist.

I guess now we get to see what a radical does with it.

The conservative mayor of Tehran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a former hard-line militia member, appeared to be rolling to a landslide victory in the presidential runoff election as votes were being counted Saturday, after a campaign that exposed deep class divisions in Iran and a widespread desire to rid the country of corruption and cronyism.

With 24 million votes counted, representing about half of Iran's eligible voters, Mr. Ahmadinejad claimed 15 million votes, to 9 million for his more moderate opponent, Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, according to IRNA, the official Iranian News Agency.

From the Times.

Just as an aside: according to the U.S. Census Bureau (oddly enough), the total population of Iran in 1980 - the year after Mr. Khomeini's revolution took hold - was around 39,583,000. The CIA World Factbook has a current number of 68,017,860. I don't know what the mortality rate in Iran is, but let's be conservative and say only that there are probably upwards of thirty million people currently alive in Iran who have for all their lives amid the decline of revolutionary ardor and the relative ascent of a more tolerant political culture. If all they get now is a crackdown on satellite TV, more militia members breaking up their dates, and the closure of the Tehran stock exchange . . . well, I'd expect them to get fairly pissed off.

Of course, the standard trick for lousy regimes in the Middle East is to shift public outrage toward sinister outside agencies. The U.S. is a perennial favorite, and the Europeans might find themselves more heavily libeled than usual if Mr. Ahmadinejad forces a breakdown in nuclear talks. Political violence is hardly inevitable.

Still, I'd expect to see a brain drain in the next several months; the educated and the affluent aren't going to want to endure what likely comes next. After that . . . ?

Once again, I'm glad I live in the States.

The Iranian runoff continues.

Or, it did - poll hours were extended until 10:00 PM local time to accommodate the voting crowds. Now we're waiting for the results.

Turnout, as you may have inferred, seems to have been relatively heavy - heavier than in the first round of voting (in which something like 61% of the population is thought to have cast ballots - not too far removed from voter participation in the 2004 American elections, oddly enough). There have been some allegations of impropriety (beyond those allegations listed at the other side of that link, there are also reports - which the BBC mentions in passing - that one of Mr. Rafsanjani's Tehran election observers has been stabbed), but nothing so embarrassing enough to be addressed publicly by the Guardian Council and its cohort. As the Times notes, the theocrats' interventions here are probably typified more by pressure on the populace than by vote fixing, per se.

I'm on the edge of my seat for this one, unfortunately. According to one interesting breakdown of the first round of voting, much of the unexpected (in the West, at least) success of Mr. Ahmadinejad and (alas, to a lesser extent) Mr. Karrubi came from their facility with pure economic populism. Unsurprisingly, Mr. Ahmadinejad (whose persona is summarized in the aforecited LA Times article as that of "a shining knight of Islam; ready to help the downtrodden who he said had been forgotten by the honeyed elites growing fat and decadent") is still playing that card, while Mr. Rafsanjani seems singularly ill-suited to counter it. Karl Vick gets into the question of class in the Post, but the lede may be enough:

In the 26 years since the Iranian revolution, Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani has become not only a millionaire but the most conspicuous embodiment of a privileged political class far removed from the struggles of ordinary people.

Awkward.

He may still win, of course; I gather the Iranian middle class is utterly horrified at the notion of Mr. Ahmadinejad coming to the fore (the word "fascism" has come up more than once in the coverage of the man over the last week), after all. Still, it's gotten quite scary - and I bet the next few hours are going to seem awfully long in Tehran.

About this Rove tiff . . . .

I'm sure what the man said was meant to be provocative, but it doesn't deserve to work. It's just too petty to deserve all the attention it's getting in some quarters.

. . .

Never mind all the cussing I did when I first read the article.

Anyway, I wouldn't mind if Harry Reid succinctly told him to go fuck himself, but let's not have an entire news cycle about Democrats demanding apologies. Please. It sucks the air from the real news, it makes us look weak, and, anyway, the people who are most entitled to complain have already done so.

That said, I do want to give a nod to Ken Mehlman, the Chairman of the Republican National Committee, for setting up the feeblest straw man I've seen in ages.

"It is outrageous," he said, "that the same Democratic leaders who refused to repudiate or criticize Dick Durbin's slandering of our military are now attacking Karl Rove for stating the facts. . . . Karl didn't say the Democratic Party. He said liberals."

Aw. He just tries so hard to be like the grownup demagogues!

Quick aside from Iran.

Ahmadinejad's positions have alarmed reformers as well as those with more traditional views. In a recent interview with state television, he said he would shutter the Tehran Stock Exchange because the uncertain nature of trading offended the tenets of Islam. "The sort of work they do in the stock exchange is like gambling, so it has got to be closed," he said.

From the Post.

Actually, I hadn't appreciated the complexity of the relationship between traditional Islam and modern economic and financial systems - but it turns out that between injunctions against gambling and against interest-accruing debt/investment relations, the economic options of some devout Muslims are very tangled indeed. Might ultimately have been another serious advantage for the West - we get to enjoy a whole other degree of liquidity of capital than do people who have to hesitate before getting home loans.

As for the Iranian case - well, if I were a voter in that part of the world, this would seem to be another strong argument for Rafsanjani. Given Iran's economic performance over the last few years, I wouldn't think that signaling another step back toward a medieval infrastructure would do the state's wealth base a whole lot of good . . . .

Dammit.

A couple of days past freshness, but still worthy of being set on fire in a public place . . .

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld is considering new top command assignments that would possibly include promoting Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, the former American commander in Iraq during the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal, Pentagon and military officials say.

From the Times. Apparently the military has "put the abuse scandal behind it."

Great.

Boltonwatch!

Briefly - because I'd really like to be in bed - Mr. Bolton's nomination took another hit today; it seems increasingly likely (to me, at least) that the Bush Administration will bypass the confirmation route and simply make Mr. Bolton a recess appointment to the U.N., with all the loss of credibility that entails. [The other way out, as Lincoln Chafee says, would be for the White House to release the documents the Senate has requested - but, of course, that would constitute an admission of failure of executive power, and that's something this White House does not like to do.]

Anyway, the really great Bolton story of the last thirty-six hours comes by way of the Washington Post - it turns out that while we're all watching the strange adventure of the confirmation hearings, the State Department is getting used to life without its former undersecretary.

Without the hard-charging Bolton around, the Bush administration not only has moved to reconcile with Russia over nuclear threat reduction but also has dropped its campaign to oust the chief of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and made common cause with European allies in offering incentives to Iran to persuade it to drop any ambitions for nuclear weapons.

Should've promoted him sideways years ago . . . .

Back in Iran . . .

First of all, political text messaging? Turns out to be popular enough to be worth criminalizing. Welcome to the information age!

Seriously, I know this isn't a critical quality-of-life issue - a cell-phone is not life and limb, and Iranian citizens are past masters at getting their technology past their self-appointed leaders. [Google for stories of satellite dishes in Tehran if you doubt it.] But, good lord, the gall! Legitimate states don't get to casually silence their citizens; that's pretty much the whole point of them.

In my own private wonderland, anyway.

Anyway, given details like the above, nobody should be surprised to learn that the election is still making waves. The runoff is, I believe, scheduled for Friday - and while the reformist candidates continue to issue protests and receive threats . . .

"My popular votes were increasing in spite of the fact that certain sections of the Revolutionary Guards and basij forces -- by paying money to religious centers and gathering places, and their unusual presence in polls -- were illegally publicizing another candidate," Karrubi wrote in an open letter to Khamenei. "I had told you about this before the election day and I am informed that same warning was given to you by the interior, intelligence and justice ministers."

The state's response came in two forms. The Guardian Council announced a quick recount of 100 random ballot boxes in four provinces. Within hours, it declared the election fair.

Meanwhile, the three newspapers that quoted Karrubi's letter Monday morning were closed, joining a list of more than 100 publications shuttered by hard-liners in Iran's judiciary.

"We advise Mr. Karrubi to revise his statement," said a spokesman for the Revolutionary Guard, which was formed to safeguard the Islamic republic in the days after the 1979 revolution, but in recent years has been at the vanguard of hard-liners' attempts to dominate Iran's elective offices. "There are certain red lines nobody should cross, including Mr. Karrubi."

. . . the anti-theocratic elements of the electorate are apparently reconsidering their disdain for Mr. Rafsanjani (who, for all his faults, has presumably never been a drill sergeant for any militia movements).

By the way, in my last post I gave a certain amount of support to the idea that the first round of the election had been rigged. In retrospect, that was even more irresponsible than the norm here at the Wall - there are enough warning signs to warrant suspicion, but I seem to recall that a substantial minority of the Iranian electorate - somewhere between 15 and 25% (?) - really is in favor of the clerical regime as Mr. Khameini envisions it. Moreover, from what I've read in the American press, Mr. Ahmadinejad ran a relatively populist campaign; given the state of the Iranian economy, he might fairly have won support from elements of society disinclined to trust Mr. Rafsanjani (whom I gather has a reputation as a kind of aristocratic brigand).

Then, of course, there's the stick-it-to-Bush vote.

Anyway, there's reason to be concerned about the purity of the vote, and there's even more reason to worry about what an Ahmadinejad presidency would look like - but I probably shouldn't be in any hurry to delegitimize the results of the polls without better evidence, no matter how much I dislike them. Distorting the picture won't do anybody any good.

Mea culpa.

Well, there's a stink.

The Interior Ministry issued what it said were unofficial final results on Saturday evening, saying the former two-term president, Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, would face off against the ultra-conservative mayor of Tehran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. It was unclear what effect the accusations of fraud would have on the planned vote.

An element of the bizarre was added to the whole affair because Mr. Ahmadinejad, who had hovered at the back of the field of candidates in pre-election opinion surveys, announced hours before the ministry issued its own results that he would be in the runoff.

The government did not immediately respond to the charges of vote tampering, but the cloud had been hanging over the race since the early morning hours when the Interior Ministry found its results being publicly contradicted on state television by the Guardian Council, the panel controlled by hard-line clerics that has the ultimate say over all government actions. It has, for example, the power to unilaterally reject the outcome of the election.

Initially, the Interior Ministry had Mr. Rafsanjani first, Mr. Karroubi second and Mr. Ahmadinejad third. Half an hour later the Guardian Council, which is not supposed to be involved in counting ballots, said Mr. Ahmadinejad was in first place.

From the New York Times.

I'd always assumed that the theocratic core was still confident enough to abide relatively moderate figureheads in the presidency - Mr. Khatami's two terms were meaningless enough. But this really does look bogus, particularly in light of basically all of the pre-election polling I've seen.

I wonder how the Iranian people are going to take it . . . .

More geekishness.

I saw Batman Begins today.

Yep, yep, yep.

Now, there are a couple of complaints that could reasonably be made. I could wish that the makers of this movie hadn't felt obliged to turn it into an action spectacular at the very end; one of its greatest strengths throughout was its sense of scale, and tying up Bruce Wayne's odyssey with big explosions and rockets flying . . . well, it wasn't offensive, but it seemed kinda beside the point. I could also want Katie Holmes's character better fleshed out - I appreciate that she served a spurring role that Alfred simply couldn't (not in the fetishistic damsel-in-distress sense, but rather as the one who got angry with Bruce when he crossed the line) but the romantic vibe never got as well developed as it might've.

There's more, but those are the most obvious (and accessible) at this sitting - and I'm eager to get them out of the way so that I can talk about the good.

So - just so anyone who reads this can call me on it after I've had a few weeks to think and get embarrassed by my first reactions - the good starts with this: this is the best super-hero movie so far (with the possible exception of the original Superman, which I just can't judge dispassionately - apart from my growing dissatisfaction with Luthor-as-buffoon). It's more character-driven than the X-Men movies, and more strongly plotted than the Spider-Man films.

Damning with faint praise? Maybe, but I liked every film I just cited; make of that what you will.

But where Batman really wins - over action movies in general, actually - is that Bruce Wayne isn't just reasonably credible (and, seriously, I bought Christian Bale's Wayne at least as much as Leonardo DiCaprio's Howard Hughes); he has adult dimensions. It's a really important point: amid all the film's anger and fear, the protagonist is a man who makes major ethical decisions and methodically pursues their consequences. We see him at his low point as a would-be assassin - and then he chooses at every step to take the harder, higher road into . . . well, craziness, yes, but craziness with an admirable and explicitly social purpose.

How often do we see movies - particularly violent movies - where brute gratification isn't the goal? Where the hero isn't just out to be the alpha male? Sure wasn't there in the era of Die Hard. Here, though, you've got your will to power, and you've got a tangible sense of idealism evolving to balance it out.

On that note, I can't tell you how happy I am that the twitchiest, angriest Batman I've seen in the movies is also the one who goes out of his way not to leave a trail of dead bodies behind him.

Some of the reviews I've read have dwelled on the extent to which the Batman schtick is made to look practical - and I guess that does deserve some comment. The toys are perhaps slightly overdone (though hugely less so than in Bond movies these days), but the way the methodology is presented is really kinda brilliant. The suit and headgear are much more menacing when the character really operates in shadow - add to that a flair for misdirection, and you have action scenes that come out of horror movies rather than wire-fu spectaculars. It's the first time ever a live-action Batman has come across as scary, and it's done well enough to make one think that someone who could actually do this stuff (which is just barely within the realm of plausibility) really would be more valuable than a SWAT team.

Christian Bale is simply excellent. Michael Caine, Morgan Freeman, Gary Oldman, and Liam Neeson all deliver their performances like they believe in the movie - and, man, they elevate it. And our director, Christopher Nolan . . . well, I thought Memento was the work of a really smart guy who had a future ahead of him, and this pretty much proves me right. I've gotta go find Insomnia now, I guess.

It's also nice to see a Gotham City shorn of the operatic excess Tim Burton brought along; I think this movie really did work better for having been filmed in Chicago. With this one, unworldliness would've been a mistake.

So: thumbs way up.

Maybe half of what we know is wrong.

I was a history major in college; I may have mentioned that before. Until then, most of my history had come from public school textbooks - which had pretty much taught that the only way to understand an ocean was to meticulously note the times when a few waves hit the shore - and I wasn't all that enthusiastic about what I figured was ahead of me. I wanted to be a fiction writer, though, and I thought taking a reasonably good look at how the world had gotten to where it was in the early `90s might be a reasonable way to prepare myself for inventing trends and predicting the doings of imaginary communities.

But, before walking into the archives, I had done the more obvious thing: I spent my first year as an undergrad as an English major. At another university, or at a different time in my life, it might have been fun, but for a kid earnestly trying to shove hormones and confusion into words as slick as William Gibson's, playing deconstruction games with the symbolism of Donald Barthelme seemed actively destructive to the cause - not least because I was good at it. I had this sense that academic English pointed toward the death of passion (to say nothing of a different flavor of pretentiousness than I favored at the time), and I decided I'd be better off with whatever rhythms and meters and storytelling tools I picked up on my own. I was kind of an ornery kid.

And I think I turned out okay, in a quasi-professional sense. I think my narrative instincts are pretty strong, when I can wake them up, and I still love reading. Still, I don't really have the formal tools to discuss the way narrative works and the extent to which we use stories to shape our expectations of almost everything we don't know intimately - and that's a shame (to me, at least), because I think about this kind of thing a lot.

. . .

Though perhaps not enough to keep all the romantic beliefs of my twenties - all that faith in joyless tenacity - from relying just a bit too much on one or two of the smarter (and therefore more dangerous) TV shows I saw in my teens.

Ahem.

Anyway, all of this was prompted by an excellent (if exuberantly dark) essay I read a couple of hours ago - actually an outtake from Chuck Klosterman's book, Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: a Low Culture Manifesto. I don't necessarily accept his overall pessimism, but if you can overlook the real message of the piece - that he didn't have a really great relationship with a certain ex-girlfriend - there's some genuinely interesting stuff about the extent to which your average American can pick up his or her sense of normalcy in interpersonal relationships from our (let's be kind and say) extremely stylized popular entertainment.

That's always good for a chuckle!

Meanwhile, in Zimbabwe - again.

Hm. Y'know, my last post on the subject may have implied that the Broad Alliance was really assembling an effective, popular movement for its two-day strike. Now that it's done, it seems that that might not have been the case. Exhibit A: the lede in allAfrica.com's wrap-up story.

Bitter divisions in the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) and a lack of visible leadership on the part of its civil society partners are to blame for the failure of the recent stayaway in Zimbabwe, political analysts said on Friday.

There's considerably more, but it's hard to get clearer than that. Mind you, it wasn't a total non-starter; there was enough protest to provoke violence from the authorities (according to Michael Hartnack, writing for the AP), and the Mugabe Administration seemed secure enough to settle in and issue some paranoid blather:

State radio described the strike Friday as "a failed attempt to sabotage Zimbabwe's economic turnaround."

President Robert Mugabe criticized the main opposition Movement for Democratic Change for "sacrificing the interests of the people of Zimbabwe in a bid to serve their colonial masters," the station reported.

Selfish bastards!

Note the immediately following paragraph as well:

Economists said five years of unprecedented economic decline in Zimbabwe have left only about 800,000 of its 12 million people with jobs in the formal sector, making it difficult to gauge the effect of the strike.

Plus, of course, police were empowered to ransack any shop that didn't open - and to cancel the permits of absentee store owners.

As an aside, I've offered the new pope and the Catholic Church as an institution a certain amount of public doubt on this blog - so I figure I'd be karmically out of balance if I didn't make note of Zimbabwe's Catholic bishops, and their public stand against Mr. Mugabe's program of urban demolition . . . .

Who's running for what, now? [Persian edition.]

I'm mostly posting this so I'll be able to find the link in a week: a blog called Tehran Post has been good enough to post biographical paragraphs for the candidates in the Iranian presidential elections. The bright blue link takes one to the bios of the three front-runners; the entry directly above it fills in the details on the five likely also-rans.

As far as I know, Mr. Rafsanjani is still favored to win - though, of course, a reformist boycott could shift the proportions of the vote to favor more fiercely authoritarian candidates (by which I probably mean Mr. Qalibaf).

Elections are on the 17th of this month.

Anybody remember John Bolton?

Nah, me either.

Still, if some gossamer wisps of recollection flutter in the back of your mind, you may be delighted to learn that the latest news is that there really is no news.

The Senate standoff over John R. Bolton's nomination as ambassador to the United Nations continued Tuesday, with the administration rejecting what Democrats said was their latest compromise offer.

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) searched for the 60 votes he would need to cut off debate on the nomination, but it was unclear whether he would seek a Senate vote this week or delay the confirmation battle until at least next week.

. . .

But prospects of an early vote seemed unlikely Tuesday. Sen. Christopher J. Dodd (D-Conn.) told colleagues at a closed-door luncheon that the administration had rejected a plan he offered over last week's recess to provide Democrats with information on reports sought by Bolton about National Security Agency intercepts of overseas communications.

From the LA Times.

I'm all for the principle the Democrats are shouting about here, by the way - as mentioned in previous entries, I think the White House needs a serious check on its approach to sharing information with other branches of government - but in terms of the grand zero sum game, I think they've already lost. The media has (surprise!) lost interest, so there isn't a growing sense of unrest from the American public about this incompetent Vice President Cheney wants to reward - and, certainly, there's almost no chance the Bush Administration is going to back down (or fail to browbeat Senate Republicans who threaten to go off the reservation).

The dutifully fixated Steve Clemons is still optimistic about the odds of Mr. Bolton's nomination being scuttled, though, and he presents some interesting scheduling details to support himself in the short term. So, I'm pessimistic, but not yet despairing.

[On a somewhat related note, the House is once again rattling sabers at the UN. I'm wary of the whole "withholding cash" thing - not least because I don't trust in the intentions of the people behind the movement - but as a matter of principle I'm surely not going to say that I'd be unhappy to see the Commission on Human Rights reconstituted in such a way as would require Sudan or Zimbabwe to get clean bills of health before being allowed in the room.]

Just for the record . . .

Part of the reason posting has been so sparse for the past couple of days - and today in particular - is recurring illness in my beloved but faintly sinister computer. The poor dear is suffering catastrophic slowdowns and an increasing number of startups that begin with half-hour adventures in Scandisk (blast you, F: drive!), and they all seem to be at their worst on your warmer, stickier days - the days, in short, when I have the least patience for them.

So, for most of the afternoon, the machine has been left dark to regain her equilibrium. I'm more than a little fidgety about work that isn't getting done (blogging included), but I got to reread an old Steven Brust book, so the day wasn't a total waste.

Or didn't feel like it at the time.

Betsie here is going to be going in for repairs and professional-grade lovin' this weekend (I think) and (I also think) I'll be bringing home a `net-sensitive temp computer while she's gone - so, hopefully, I'm not going to drop entirely off the face of the earth anytime soon. But, again, posting may be at kind of a lull for a little while; please bear with me.

Mm. Robots.

Including the long-awaited swimming eye-on-a-stalk!

We're all officially living in science fiction now. Let's hope it's not the creepy kind.

[The photos are apparently from the 2005 World Exposition in Aichi, Japan. I've barely looked at the website so far, but I'm making a list of the things for which I pine . . . .]

Baltimore to D.C. - in Soviet style, baby!

I feel like I'm just falling for a joke that's making its way around the blogosphere - and, yet, it seems to be real.

Behold: a poster I'm told was found on the MARC line!

. . .

No, really.



Added at 8:56 PM: The site at which the poster is . . . well, posted is here. Nothing about it screams practical joke, but I'm still suspicious. Who knew public transportation could be so subversive?

On a lighter note . . .

We3 the Movie?

That may be the single most terrifying prospect to come out of Hollywood this decade . . . .

The most depressing story of the week.

Seriously.

A couple of teenagers in Texas found themselves on the verge of parenthood - of twins, in fact - and they couldn't handle it. The method of abortion on which they finally settled (in the fifth month of pregnancy) involved the boy (19) standing on the stomach of the girl (16). She miscarried a week later.

Now, Texas law prevents a woman from being charged in cases of abortion, but outside her body the sky's apparently the limit - the state holds that, legally, life begins at conception. So the boy, Gerardo Flores, was tried and convicted on two charges of capital murder - the prosecution didn't seek the death penalty, so (assuming his appeals don't go well) he's scheduled for life in prison - with a possibility of parole in forty years. The full story's here.

I find myself imagining what it would be like to be sixteen and stupid and so afraid of the future that I ask someone to step on me until something dies. To be nineteen and to actually do it.

It just breaks the heart.

Fifty-one pages of Iraqi numbers.

I now discover - thanks to Ivo Daalder - that the Brookings Institution has made available (as a pdf file, for those who can bear to break out the Acrobat) a whole slew of indicators on security and quality of life in Iraq. If anybody's looking for raw data - flawed though some of it may be - you could do worse than to check this out.

It's dated June 6th, for what it's worth . . . .

Meanwhile, in Zimbabwe.

The BBC's southern Africa correspondent Barnaby Phillips says Zimbabwe is set for another test of strength between an embattled opposition and a repressive government.

The government has put on a show of force - with military helicopters clattering overhead - leaving people in no doubt that those who do strike could face punishment, he says.

The above, obviously, comes care of the BBC.

The story in short: Mr. Mugabe's government is continuing in (or even expanding upon) its previously mentioned urban purges, and now an umbrella movement called the Broad Alliance (with the backing of the Movement for Democratic Change, Zimbabwe's main opposition party), is calling for a society-wide strike on Thursday and Friday to protest the policy. According to SW Radio Africa, Mr. Mugabe's government is now starting to make its displeasure with the Broad Alliance's proposal known - both by arresting at least one Member of Parliament and by falsifying the official media coverage of the planned event.

The real fireworks, though, are still a few hours off . . . .

How cool is this?

More cool than Fonzie in an Alaskan winter, I'd say!

Experts have discovered a previously unknown work by Johann Sebastian Bach in documents taken from a German library shortly before it was heavily damaged by fire, researchers said Wednesday.

It was believed to be the first new Bach work to surface in 30 years.

From the AP feed at Salon . . . .

The Post on Putin.

A few months after his election, Putin gave a speech at a closed-door ceremony at the Lubyanka headquarters of the old KGB. The occasion was a Stalin-inaugurated holiday known as the Day of the Chekist, marking the founding of the Soviet secret police originally known as the cheka . Gathered there to listen to Putin were about 300 generals from the KGB and its successor agency, celebrating the rise of one of their own.

"Instruction number one for obtaining full power has been completed," Putin announced to the generals.

The few civilians in the hall thought it was a joke.

It's an instance of the newspaper trimming one of its reporters' books into an essay, but that's okay. That probably means it's more deeply researched than a lot of what turns up in newsprint - and it's certainly compelling.

[I'd write more, but I'm expecting the book in the mail - so if I comment at all, it might as well be from the full work.]

- - -

What else from Russia? Mr. Putin's image seems to be getting somewhat tarnished, and the political destruction of Mr. Khodorkovsky might actually have been less complete than we in the West may have assumed. Plus, unease stemming from the Khodorkovsky trial has (according to Bloomberg.com) threatened some fourteen billion dollars' worth of outside investment, and Moscow is clearly nervous. And, impressively enough, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn has emerged from seclusion to issue condemnations and warnings, but I don't get the sense (despite the Times Online) that he's predicting an imminent Orange Revolution. There's just a lot of tension in the system.

- - -

One closing tangent - as far as I can tell, the Putin Administration is having a much harder time dealing with the Internet than with traditional media; some strange bills have been rumored to be in play at the Duma, and there's been the occasional example of noise from the political class leading to self-censorship, but so far no one in the legislature has tried to get the ball rolling on any attempt to match China's success in filtering out all the politically awkward voices. [This may sound like the story of a blogger getting caught up in the potential of the e-aether, but it's worth noting that some 15.5% of the Russian population apparently has Internet access these days - up from about 7% in 2001. I'm sure we're talking about relatively affluent, relatively urban populations - people likely to have superior sources of information at the outset - but it's still clearly not an insignificant sector of the total populace.]

The emerging exception, unsurprisingly, has to do with Chechnya. We've already seen that mention of the place and its political ramifications has been forbidden at www.stihi.ru; meanwhile, the Russian government is leaning on its neighbors to shut Chechen websites off at their source (in at least one case, that source being inside the flat of a Lithuanian MP!). Given very real fears of terrorist activity, that may not be an unreasonable request - but Russia's treatment of Chechnya overall has not been of a sort to inspire faith.

Bleah. Here endeth the digest.

Ooh! Pretty pictures!

First things first: Tome 1 of Ange & Alary's Belladone turned up today. I think I may still retain enough high school French to crack most of the dialogue, but since I've been too lazy to try all I can really speak to is the visual narrative.

And, frankly, I'd rather whisper sweet nothings into the visual narrative's gracefully rounded ear. Swashbuckling in the age of Louis XIV? Beautiful Hindu spies? The mad cartoonish energy you find in your better Disney expatriates (Pierre Alary, at least, is indeed a veteran of the Mouse)?

Thank you, sir - may I have another?

Alas, this ain't cheap. For freebies - albeit dreadfully limited freebies - I direct your attention to a couple of Pants Press highlights. Bill Mudron's Peter Pan, for example. Sure, progress is very, very slow, but if you're coming in cold there are thirty-some pages to explore (and a few character studies off to the side). I have the suspicion that the pacing is going to seem strange if and when there's a final product on the table, but since this is essentially a lovingly crafted first draft I'm inclined to cut the man some slack.

Or, if you're in the mood for something more contained, we've got Vera Brosgol's guest-authorial turn on Scary Go Round here and here. Revolutionary? Maybe not. But if John Allison ever gets too fresh with an angry woodchipper, I don't think anyone else on the planet could capture the Tao of Amy the way Vera does - and she should note that on her CV.

For the record.

More on Mr. Mugabe's magic kingdom.

Today's Post has an article on Zimbabwe's latest experiment in criminally bad governance: an attack on urban development that has (as mentioned earlier) left millions homeless. Craig Timberg, the author of this new piece, raises the idea that this isn't meant to punish anti-Mugabe members of the electorate, per se, but might actually be more of a bid to reverse urbanization - it clears off some potentially arable land, maybe inspires some starving urbanites to go back into agricultural labor. If Mr. Mugabe's lucky, he'll never have to embarrass himself by admitting the country needs food again!

What does it take to get South Africa to lean on this guy?

And those PR guys used to seem so cunning.

Alas, they've gotten fat, spoiled, and lazy.

Seriously, is there any other way to account for the darkening nightmare that is the American Koran scandal? When the Bush Administration's mouthpieces were all in full screech over Newsweek's error, did it occur to no one that all the transparent hypocrisy would burn like butane once the stories of kicking, stomping, and accidental urination got out? Did they think the official revelations would run in small print between the ads on page A26 of every newspaper in the Muslim world?

Did they even think at all?

I suspect they didn't - not about the important stuff. I suspect they were so caught up in the idea of chastising their annoyances in the press that they just filed all the inevitable fallout to the backs of the stacks, to be confronted as necessary on some more auspicious day.

It was an amazingly stupid call, however it came about. It would be nice if we had somebody highly placed doing damage control, but . . . well, the person whose job it would be hasn't checked in yet. Getting our Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy into her office apparently hasn't been a terribly high priority for the administration or for the lady herself.

Welcome to life in the world's only hyperpower.

Not the greatest tragedy in Burma . . .

But one we don't hear about very often in the West: restoration, bad junta-style.

"We all hate the [new observation] tower," said another man. "But if we say the government is not very good, we get in trouble."

The quote's from a BBC article on the condition of what remains of medieval (by which I think I mean eleventh through fourteenth century) Bagan/Pagan. The thrust of the article (and that of a similar one, written for National Geographic's TravelWatch) is that the Burmese generals are trying to "beautify" the country's archaeological heritage for the tourist industry - and that they're doing it without the benefit of any of the kinds of expertise that one would think would be required. I could rant about bathroom tiles and golf courses, but the TravelWatch article can present the point with more dignity:

Where the original architecture is unknown, unskilled restorers often conjure up arbitrary guesses, dressing up the temples and stupas in new red bricks and identical spires, with little eye to historic authenticity. The modern commercial bricks bear no resemblance to the medieval ones. International restoration experts also complain that the new brick adornments are slapped atop rickety old walls without reinforcement—this in an earthquake zone.

Each of the authentic temples typically had its own unique design, but the junta has crowned the remnants of old foundations with standardized cookie-cutter models.

In at least one temple, restorers whitewashed over the wall decorations. In another, a four-armed Vishnu god sprouted six arms.

And did I mention the golf course?

Anyway, there are some beautiful - if low-rez - photos of Bagan up at PhotographersDirect. It's clearly an amazing place . . . even without help from the junta.

This was unexpected.

The United States yesterday named Saudi Arabia and three other Persian Gulf Arab allies as having among the world's worst records in halting human trafficking, a rebuke that could subject the countries to sanctions if they do not act quickly to address U.S. concerns.

The finding, in an annual report issued by the State Department, places Kuwait, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia in the same category as such countries as Cuba, Burma, North Korea and Sudan. Human rights activists said the inclusion of such close allies in the war on terrorism suggests that the administration is beginning to eliminate from its human rights policy what some have dubbed the "Middle East exception."

From Glenn Kessler, at the Post.

Palestinian elections postponed.

Kicked back from mid-July to November, more specifically. Haaretz has the details.

I mention this because . . . well, it's worth mentioning. The relative lack of violence in Israel and Palestine needs all the structural support it can get, and if offering Hamas direct political involvement makes it less prone to paramilitary action and suicide bombing, then - distasteful as it seems - it's probably a good thing. Thankfully, neither Hamas nor the Islamic Jihad are threatening to pull out of the cease-fire as a result.

That said, though the unilateral nature of the postponement may've been necessary to keep Fatah in line, it's a worrying thing. Mr. Abbas has just returned from an angioplasty, and concerns for his health are forcing him to appoint a deputy/heir - which can't be helping in his efforts to keep his party tame . . . .

Remember when I wrote about Deep Throat?

Just the other day! See, I was annoyed that what I'd seen on television was shorn of historical context, and unfairly negative: the problem, as I saw it then, was that people seemed unrealistically to be suggesting that Mr. Felt pursued legitimate goals in an improper manner.

Today, of course, I see that I underestimated what was coming.

Here's Peggy Noonan, for OpinionJournal:

What Mr. Felt helped produce was a weakened president who was a serious president at a serious time. Nixon's ruin led to a cascade of catastrophic events--the crude and humiliating abandonment of Vietnam and the Vietnamese, the rise of a monster named Pol Pot, and millions--millions--killed in his genocide. America lost confidence; the Soviet Union gained brazenness. What a terrible time. Is it terrible when an American president lies and surrounds himself by dirty tricksters? Yes, it is. How about the butchering of children in the South China Sea. Is that worse? Yes. Infinitely, unforgettably and forever.

Variations on the same theme, from Pat Buchanan . . .

There's something deadly serious here. People that brought down Nixon also resulted in the fall of South Vietnam, the death of hundreds of thousands of people. ... Nixon was brought down by people who were a hell of a lot worse than he was.

. . . and Rush Limbaugh:

Had they not brought down Nixon, we wouldn't have lost Vietnam. Had [they] not brought down Nixon, the Khmer Rouge would not have come to power and murdered two million people in a full-fledged genocide.

The latter two quotes come care of Media Matters.

Two obvious points: Richard Nixon and his administration engaged in criminal activities. The "people who brought him down" include the 93rd Congress - members of both parties - and the Supreme Court of the United States.

Minor historical background: President Nixon called for a stop in offensive action in North Vietnam on January 15, 1973; the Paris Peace Accords were signed on the 27th of January. The trial of the Watergate burglars (which had begun in June of 1972) ended in a series of guilty pleas between January 11 and January 30, 1973 - almost exactly cotemporaneous with the formal cessation of American military action in Vietnam. President Nixon actually resigned on August 9, 1974.

I presume, then, that what Pat Buchanan and company believe is either that (a) President Nixon only agreed to the cessation of American involvement in the Vietnam War because he felt that it was an unacceptable political liability in the face of public concerns over his administration's domestic criminal activities, or that (b) President Nixon would have remobilized American troops before the fall of Saigon in 1975, had he remained in office. Not to belabor the point, but I don't think either is terribly likely.

Point (a)? Henry Kissinger declared that "Peace is at hand!" before the 1972 elections - and take that, George McGovern! By November of `72, American troops in the theater were down to 27,000 (from 196,700 in October of `71); heavy bombing was phased out in December. This stuff just wasn't totally sudden - nor as cynical as point (a) would presuppose.

Point (b)? Does anyone honestly think President Nixon could have convinced the American people to send another hundred thousand troops to Vietnam in 1975? To re-escalate bombing?

No. Just . . . no.

As for the bit about the Khmer Rouge . . . y'know, had President Nixon not authorized illegal bombing campaigns in Cambodia, the whole point might have been moot. As long as people want to play games of "what if."

Anyway, I don't really think that Ms. Noonan and Mr. Buchanan are at their most intellectually serious here (Mr. Limbaugh might be, of course). Their hypotheticals aren't meant to be taken at face value; they just want to underline the idea that Mr. Nixon's crimes did not of themselves render him unfit for office. He was intellectually intact, he was pursuing policies they found preferable to those of his successors - therefore, it would have been for the best had he stayed. Despite the crimes he'd committed - which no one seems to deny - Congress and Supreme Court were in error in attempting to apply sanction, in serving as checks and balances on his power.

That's what they're saying. We can all ponder for ourselves the extent to which the subtext is the Bush Administration, and its opponents' occasional efforts to force John Bolton or potential judges to answer for their histories before moving on to higher office. There's still one question that's due to be asked of these pundits:

Do we really want monarchy with term limits? Not just when you like the president at hand, but as a matter of American tradition?

"A serious president at a serious time." Good grief.

It seems like all I ever do is complain.

The subject of the moment? Zimbabwe.

Robert Mugabe has conceded that the country needs escalated food aid in a big way. Because he's Robert Mugabe, of course, he couldn't show weakness and request it. Instead, he said only that it would be welcome - and the UN's World Food Programme is jumping at the chance, because Mr. Mugabe has for the last several months preferred to let his people go hungry than to let outside agencies operate in-country freely amid his preparations for the March 31 elections, and need is presumed to be very real. In fact, up to four million people - a third of Zimbabwe's population - are believed to be at risk. Since Mr. Mugabe is calling the shots, the WFP won't be permitted to distribute food directly; my immediate worry, therefore, is that Mr. Mugabe is again going to feed his supporters and starve his enemies.

It would certainly seem to be of a pattern with Zimbabwe's current campaign of urban housing destruction.

Nearly two million people in Zimbabwe's towns and cities have been left homeless, while a further 22,000 street traders have been arrested as Robert Mugabe intensified a crackdown on opposition strongholds.

The 81-year-old President said bands of armed police - who have gone on the rampage in the past two weeks demolishing and burning down flea markets and other makeshift shop stalls, backyard shacks and informal settlements - are "cleaning up" the cities.

. . .

Mr Mugabe's critics complain he is pursuing a relentless campaign to crush all dissent and pre-empt any uprising on the back of the economic slump by hitting the same urban areas that largely voted against him in March elections.

The crackdown is also seen as punishment for urban voters who have rejected Mr Mugabe's candidates in mayoral and parliamentary elections. He is mocked as "President of Zimbabwean rural areas". But such rhetoric is now outlawed under legislation meant to protect the "dignity of the president".

Two million people, you will note, is about a sixth of Zimbabwe's total population.

The only good news I can see coming out of Zimbabwe at the moment (apart from the fact that fewer people might have to starve than had been expected) is a function of the power Mr. Mugabe received from the aforementioned (most likely rigged) March elections. He now has the majorities he needs to amend Zimbabwe's constitution, and he apparently plans to use them to add a senatorial chamber to Parliament. This will, of course, be stacked with sycophants - and, God help us, that's the positive sign. It's being read as an attempt to protect himself from prosecution once he retires from the presidency (a step currently promised for 2008) - which gives the world reason to hope that he's genuinely planning to step down.

[He's apparently likely to be succeeded by Joyce Mujuru, another revolutionary hero; I'm hoping that she'll either be less corrupt or will command less deference from the South African government.]

And Zimbabwe used to be one of Africa's real success stories . . . .

After "non," a "nee."

From the Times:

Dutch voters today were set to firmly reject a constitution for Europe, following France in undermining the region's ambitions to play a stronger role on the world scene and deepening a crisis for the 25-member European Union.

Voter turnout was strong and reached 50 percent by percent by 7:00 p.m., two hours before the polls closed, according to a polling firm, Interview-NSS.

The referendum was not binding, but there was a consensus in Parliament that it would respect the outcome if more than 30 percent of those eligible cast a vote.

This is probably it for the proposed constitution. I'm reasonably pro-E.U. (and very much in favor of Turkish integration into same), but I don't know that I'm all that disappointed by the results of these referenda - what I've seen of the draft constitution is just an ugly stew of rules (George Will, in his snotty way, highlights provisions on real estate transactions in Malta and guidelines for reindeer husbandry among the Sami) and no poetry. The necessary bits will no doubt find their way onto treaties - and maybe European citizens en masse will get to participate in a fresh debate about what they want from their common culture, rather than simply waiting for the opportunity to rubberstamp the operating protocols of a growing continental bureaucracy.

How did I miss this?

There was a real, evil Batman in the nineteenth century? And nobody thought to tell me?

Feh. I'm deeply disappointed in each and every one of you.

At any rate, I give you - and I swear I'm not making this up - Spring Heeled Jack!

W. Mark Felt.

There's going to be a lot of Deep Throat in the media for the next few days - not least because journalists really like talking about the modern history of journalism (and how they perceive themselves along the way) - and, from what I saw on MSNBC yesterday, there's a decent chance that the coverage we see at any given time is going to be wretched.

An unreasonable amount of screen time seems to have been offered to people out to argue that Mr. Felt's assistance of the Woodward and Bernstein investigation was by definition dishonorable - that, as a law enforcement officer, Mr. Felt had an extraordinary obligation to pursue his concerns through and within the criminal justice system. In a perfect world, that may be true - but if one is going to assemble a pack of pundits to bloviate about a man's character, one would do one's audience a service to explore the context in which the man acted.

The context in brief: J. Edgar Hoover died less than two months before the Watergate break-in (June 17th, 1972). The dominant personalities of the FBI, Mr. Felt included, expected Mr. Hoover's successor to be selected from within the ranks of the Bureau, but the Nixon Administration instead appointed Assistant Attorney General L. Patrick Gray III to the post of Acting Director. The following passage, from James Mann's excellent 1992 article, "Deep Throat: An Institutional Analysis," gets into the meat of it:

Nixon and his aides had many reasons for wanting to appoint an outsider to head the FBI -- some of them honorable, some not. They felt, as had some of their predecessors in the White House, that the FBI was too tradition-bound, and badly needed to adopt more-modern law-enforcement techniques. They also wanted the FBI to be subject to much greater political direction from the White House and the Justice Department than had been possible under Hoover.

The FBI had resisted several law-enforcement and domestic intelligence-gathering initiatives by the Nixon White House, notably the famous "Huston plan" -- the effort, led by the White House aide Tom Charles Huston, to expand intelligence-gathering through a network of informants along with a campaign of wiretapping, bugging, mail opening, and burglaries. Moreover, White House officials feared that if the FBI retained the independence it had had under Hoover, it would never go along with the Nixon Administration's continuing efforts to use the federal bureaucracy to reward friends and punish enemies.

In short, Hoover's death presented the Nixon Administration with a long-sought opportunity to gain political control of the FBI. Traumatized by Hoover's death, and anxious to preserve the Bureau's traditions, the FBI's leadership resented and resisted the Administration's efforts.

Now, I'm personally not at all sad that the culture of Mr. Hoover's FBI was forced to wither on the vine - but that certainly doesn't mean I think the Bureau would have been any more constructive as still another institutional victim of President Nixon's conflation of the needs of the nation with the demands of his own stunted ego. And, indeed, as the Watergate scandal unfolded, it emerged that the Nixon Administration really was trying to subvert the FBI.

In the very first week after the Watergate arrests, FBI investigators found that the White House was putting obstacles in the way of its investigation of the case. White House counsel John Dean insisted on sitting in on the FBI's interviews. The Bureau's efforts to interview witnesses and to obtain various records were being stalled or blocked. L. Patrick Gray, who was working closely with Dean, ordered FBI agents to call off a proposed interview with Miguel Ogarrio, a lawyer whose checks totalling $89,000 had been deposited in the bank account of one of the arrested men; Gray said the interview might jeopardize existing CIA operations in Mexico.

Nixon's White House tapes later demonstrated that, in one of the key acts of the Watergate cover-up, Nixon and his chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman, had ordered the CIA deputy director, Vernon Walters, to ask the FBI not to pursue its inquiries in Mexico. Of course, FBI officials other than Gray did not know this at the time. All they knew in late June of 1972, little more than a month after Hoover's death and Gray's appointment, was that the White House was impeding their investigation. And these White House efforts seemed to validate their worst fear: that the Nixon White House intended to use the FBI for political purposes.

And, incidentally, it emerges that Mr. Felt did make his concern known - through those proper channels - at the time.

According to Mark Felt, on July 5 three top FBI officials asked for a meeting with Gray to protest White House obstruction of the Watergate investigation. The three were Felt, Charles W. Bates, the assistant director in charge of the FBI's General Investigative Division, and Robert Kunkel, the special agent in charge of the Washington field office, which was conducting the investigation. As Felt recounted in his memoir,

"Look," I told Gray, "the reputation of the FBI is at stake.... We can't delay the Ogarrio interview any longer! I hate to make this sound like an ultimatum, but unless we get a request in writing from [CIA] Director Helms to forego the Ogarrio interview, we're going ahead anyway....

"That's not all," I went on. "We must do something about the complete lack of cooperation from John Dean and the Committee to Reelect the President. It's obvious they're holding back -- delaying and leading us astray in every way they can....

Invoking Hoover's name, Felt made clear that he and his colleagues believed that the FBI's traditions and its future were at stake:

In fact, no one could have stopped the driving force of the investigation without an explosion in the Bureau -- not even J. Edgar Hoover. For me, as well as for all the Agents who were involved, it had become a question of our integrity. We were under attack for dragging our feet and as professional law enforcement officers we were determined to go on.

One might reasonably assume that Mr. Gray did not receive this well.

Look, I don't want to make Mr. Felt out to be a saint. It's clear from his career - which resulted in jail time for illegal surveillance activities - that he was, at the least, too much a product of Mr. Hoover's FBI to be entirely trusted within Constitutional limits. [Though, as an aside, it's interesting that his wiretaps of the Weather Underground seem in some ways to evoke the current vogue for . . . aggressive counter-terrorism techniques. He'd probably have been free and clear under the Patriot Act.]

But it's disingenuous to argue that he failed in his duties here. If he had direct evidence that the Bureau had been corrupted, then contributing effective leaks to a thorough outside investigation strikes me as being at least as defensible as grabbing a microphone and offering himself up to be discredited. And it would have been nice if some of the experts I saw on the fat screen had thought to explore that - even if they ultimately disagreed.

Sigh.

This is what I get for watching TV news.