During the rush to war, it was my greatest fear that we’d muck up the aftermath by executing the rebuilding of Iraq in half-assed fashion. I’ve tried to not be discouraged by what appears, every day, to be a giant lack of planning on the part of people who seem to have genuinely expected a warm and wonderful welcome once Saddam was killed driven into hiding. I’ve tried consoling myself with the “It takes a while to rebuild a county, so give us time” meme. I’ve tried giving the President and his Administration, if not exactly the benefit of the doubt, at least a granting of the possibility that they might do it right in the end.

Well, not anymore.

Not when the Administration has to admit that its funding request for Iraqi reconstruction is $55 billion short, just one day after the President made his request for $87 billion on national television. Not when Donald Rumsfeld, Mr. “Our critics are the ones making danger”, is saying things like “”I don’t believe it’s our job to reconstruct the country.” Not when he’s claiming that what’s needed is not more, but fewer, troops. Not when, in not one but two wars now, “Blow it up and then get the hell out of Dodge” seems to be the Admistration’s general approach.

These aren’t the grownups, and they’re not in charge. They’re children, and they’re behaving like a bunch of kids with unlimited access to someone else’s toys.

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Whoa….new Blogger features….desk is spinning….head nearing exploding….oh, it’s all fine now. Whew! (Seriously, this stuff looks pretty cool.)

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Remember that episode of The Brady Bunch when Mike and the boys build a special clubhouse in the backyard for the girls? Mike instructs Bobby to go get some nails, which he does. Later on, when the girls’ clubhouse is done, suddenly the boys’ clubhouse collapses in a heap of lumber. Greg turns to Bobby and says, “When Dad told you to go find some nails, where did you get them?” And Bobby replies, “I took them out of there,” pointing to the now-collapsed boys’ clubhouse.

Well, apparently Bobby Brady now works for NASA. Check out the pictures. I especially like the two dudes standing nearby in the universal “Crap, I hope that’s not my fault” pose.

(Via Teresa Nielsen Hayden, who is on a tear right now. If you’re not reading her blog, you’re missing out. And on The Brady Bunch, whatever happened to the clubhouses, anyway? You never see them again. Did Mike get pissed and tear them down on the spot?)

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[TINFOIL]

The martini-swirling Mr. Harris sums up the airport-security screening thing that will, if enacted as-is, simply refuse to allow up to four million people access to air travel, whether they are in any position to actually threaten a plane or not. And a lot of folks see this as an unacceptable policy that is reminiscent of a police state.

But, it occurs to me that this might be a nefarious scheme to save AMTRAK!!!

Just think: those people denied permission to fly have to travel some way, right? This will increase Amtrak’s customer base in one fell swoop! What a masterstroke!

[/TINFOIL]

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Dominion has a post regarding school prayer that I found pretty funny. I love it when I don’t see the punchline coming.

(I think that Dominion and Josh Marshall should have a “narrow blog” contest!)

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I don’t know how big of a ripple-effect this will have on publishing, but the e-book has suffered what looks to me like a pretty big setback: Barnes&Noble has stopped selling them.

My view, based on not a lot outside of sheer guesswork, is that e-books won’t really become viable until handheld technology is a lot more widespread than it is now. It’ll get there, I think, but for now, e-books have been a product without a real market.

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I’m starting to wonder if Gregg Easterbrook has lost his grip on reality, or if his habit of reusing clever puns and verbal constructions until they are no longer clever is now melding with a bizarre tendency to fixate on things that just aren’t true. This has cropped up in his obsession with Senator Hillary Clinton’s byline on books, and now it’s cropping up again with respect to the Buffalo Bills’ uniforms. I don’t mind that he thinks they’re ugly. While I like the home uniform, I don’t care for the road version much. But Easterbrook keeps on insisting that the Bills have done away with red, white and blue. Funny, because the Bills’ official team website says this about the new uniforms:

The traditional red, white and blue color scheme that has been part of the Bills look since 1962 remains but has been intensified with the addition of a darker blue. The team’s red helmet with a blue charging buffalo on the side has also been maintained but has been modified to include nickel gray and navy stripes. In another nod to tradition, the nickel gray of the 1960-61 Bills returns as a subtle enhancement on the helmet as well as the jersey and pants.

Maybe Easterbrook is of the belief that “red, white and blue” only includes one specific shade of blue, but that seems like hair-splitting to me. They darkened the blue, but it’s still noticeably blue. Their pants are still white. Red is still evident in their helmets, stripes on the pants, and the side-panel of the jerseys. I’m not sure which color Easterbrook is referring when he talks about “Rusting Russian Dreadnought color” or whatever; is that the gray that’s only used as trim?

Time was when I really looked forward to Easterbrook’s columns, but the guy is sinking, fast. Maybe a Russian dreadnought can pluck him from the sea before he drowns.

(And when he mentions red, white and blue as the “most successful color scheme in history”, I wonder if he’s including Britain and France.)

Kevin Drum also comments today on Easterbrook’s tendency to ignore the obvious in favor of whatever point Easterbrook wishes to pound into the ground, this time in a case where Easterbrook sees “anti-Christian bias” in the news media that is actually much better explained from the simple standpoint of the ratings-game. That’s an important point that gets lost a lot of the time: when “What is Christian” and “What sells” happen to not be the same thing (by whichever measure of “What is Christian”), it seems a bit disingenuous to conclude bias when the media or the market gravitates toward “What sells”. This seems something that Gregg Easterbrook should know.

And finally, as long as I’m flogging Easterbrook, I might as well point out this whopper of a quote, when he compares Dennis Miller’s stint on Monday Night Football to Rush Limbaugh’s current appearances on NFL Countdown: “Note that their respective politics roughly cancel each other out, leaving a net of Pat Summerall.” It certainly seems that Easterbrook hasn’t been paying much attention to Miller lately…

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These days, it seems like nary a day passes without some me finding some reminder of the old joke about how when my ship comes in, I’ll be standing at the train station. I’m trying to get my writing career going, with spectacularly little success – – and here’s this Jim Caple guy, first being paid by ESPN to visit fifteen major-league ballparks and write about them (another ESPN writer did the other fifteen), and now he’s being paid by ESPN to travel the length of the mighty Mississippi looking for offbeat sports-stories from the heartland and our greatest river.

I’m just not living right.

(Oh, and the lucky SOB actually got to run in the Milwaukee Brewers sausage race! Ach, I hate him so much….)

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It’s a nifty month for planetary astronomy! We had Mars at its closest point to Earth in quite some time (my entry for “understatement of the year”), and now Saturn is at its best angle for viewing the rings in years.

Here we have Saturn viewed first in the ultraviolet spectrum, then in visible light, and finally in the infrared. Wow. I don’t care how much money it costs. I hope they either figure out a way to keep Hubble operating, or replace it with something even better.

(Link via Aaron, the motorcycling would-be astronomer/blues musician.)

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SDB has a couple of interesting posts today.

First, he discusses the enormous obstacle to Middle East peace that is Yasser Arafat. This is what makes the whole Middle East peace thing so frustrating: in a perfect world, it would be pretty obvious that getting Arafat off the world stage – – most likely by killing him – – would help things, but I’m just not convinced that the void created by Arafat’s departure would be filled with anything better. But then, leaving him in place certainly isn’t working out, either. I don’t think there can really be peace as long as Arafat is alive, but I don’t think the chances for peace significantly improve with him dead, either. Ugh. Talk about your quagmires: the Middle East has been one for how many thousand years now?

Second, SDB points to a news item in which some unnamed Saudi official claims that Osama Bin Laden specifically recruited a majority of Saudis for the 9-11-01 operation in order to make Saudi Arabia look bad. Now, I don’t read this person’s comments quite the same way SDB does – – SDB seems to think the Saudi source is claiming that the whole purpose of 9-11, from Bin Laden’s perspective, was to discredit Saudi Arabia by virtue of fifteen of the highjackers being Saudis. It seems to me that what’s being claimed here is not quite that, but rather that Bin Laden, having decided to execute a major operation against the US and on American soil, chose to do so in such a way that an additional benefit would be to discredit Saudi Arabia.

According to the ABCNews story, US terrorism experts pretty much reject the Saudi official’s theory, anyway. They think that the explanation for Bin Laden’s recruitment of mainly Saudis for 9-11 is more prosaic: there simply are more Saudis to recruit for terrorist activities, and they’re easier to get in place for their strikes (or at least they were, back then). I suppose it doesn’t occur to the quoted Saudi official that maybe his country is already discredited, in that it’s apparently easy to recruit Saudis to be terrorists in the first place.

(“My heart bleeds peanut butter“? That metaphor’s just weird! Between that and his “vanishing pants” thing of a few weeks ago, I’m starting to form some really odd mental images of Mr. Den Beste…)

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