Blog Rest

I'll be off the blog and the email for about five days. If you haven't read him and you've got some time this weekend, go to Lileks and sort of cruise around his bleats and screeds. He is a major talent.

Blowback

Okay. Let's run through this again. Information surfaces that shows that President Bush had sketchy, non-actionable intelligence reports indicating that Al Qaeda might be be planning an attack on the World Trade Center (or Wall Street) and the Pentagon (or The White House and Congress). At the time, Mr. Bush also had on his desk countless other non-actionable intelligence reports indicating that Al Qaeda and/or other terrorist organizations might be planning attacks on US assets, companies and citizens overseas and here at home.

Democrats and their media allies attack Bush for not doing something and suggest that his Administration tried to "cover up" these non-actionable intelligence reports. The Bush Administration is not amused by these attacks on its integrity. It responds ferociously. Vice President Cheney kicks back the hardest, in large measure because he is the least amused.

In the days that follow, various Administration figures offer a glimpse into the Big Picture that they see every day in the Threat Matrix and raw intelligence reports. It is not a pretty picture. The FBI Director says that suicide bombings in the US are inevitable. The Secretary of Defense says that terrorists will inevitably get their hands on weapons of mass destruction. And so on.

Democrats and their alllies in the press respond: Not Fair! You're Scaring Us. Cool It! We now await the predictable Democratic/press allegation that the Administration is hyping the "terror alert" for New York City this Memorial Day Weekend in an effort to further "spin" public opinion toward the President's point of view.

If you go back and read every word that President Bush, Vice President Cheney, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, Defense Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and all the others have said since September 11th, you will find that they are saying now what they have said all along. The War will be long. The US will likely be hit again. The possibility of suicide bombers in the US is real. There are grave concerns that Al Qaeda may get its hands on Weapons of Mass Destruction. Iraq and Iran and North Korea form an axis of evil that must be undone. Etcetera.

The Bush Administration and the military that serves under it have, to date, done an admirable job of balancing the public's right to know with the need for operational security. They have, within the limits that warfare prescribes, told the truth, day in and day out. And they have been very clear about the very real dangers that threaten our country.

Democratic complaints about the Administration's angry response recall the wisdom of Ice Hockey Rule 1-A: If you're going to pick a fight with someone, don't come whining when they kick your teeth in.

They're Must Be One Around Here Somewhere

Who are the last white males in America willing to consider voting for a Democratic Presidential candidate? OPDs, says Clinton pollster Mark Penn. OPDs are "office park Dads." They're married to "soccer moms." They live in primary and secondary media markets (generally speaking) and they're not like those NASCAR crackers whose children still play football.

Reading between the lines, you can see why the Democrats pulled back so quickly from their "what did he know and when did he know it?" attack on President Bush. OPDs didn't like it! They support Bush on the war issue. Time to get off the war issue.

Pennsylvania Governor (D) Results

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette has the county-by-county results of yesterday's Democratic gubernatorial primary in Pennsylvania. Former Philadelphia Mayor (and former DNC Chairman) Ed Rendell emerged victorious, defeating Robert Casey Jr. by 10 percentage points (55%-45%). Casey won all but 10 counties, but lost because of Rendell's overwhelming support in the Philadelphia media market. The results point to a close general election campaign.

Doing the Lord's Work

Evangelical Christians have become a Peace Corps unto themselves, helping humanity in places none of us would ever go. Their work gets well-deserved recognition in Nicholas Kristof's excellent column today. The demonization of the evangelical community by the Democrats and their allies in the press has been an ongoing slander. It's good to see a columnist for The New York Times cut against that grain and tell the truth.

A CIA That Spies on Americans

That's what Fareed Zakaria says we need to prevent further terrorist attacks. He's right.

The Future of Capitalism

The Economist has published a thoughtful and thorough review of the the system of international finance, entitled "Capitalism and Its Troubles." You can read it by clicking here. The chapter on the derivatives market is especially sharp and concise. Following is an excerpt:

"Derivatives allow their users both to shed risks and to take bigger risks. This dual role makes it hard to tell whether their impact is benign or malign, and there are plenty of people who argue for each side. What is certain is that financial firms, especially on Wall Street and in the City of London, love derivatives, and have hired an army of mathematicians and physicists to work as “financial engineers”, creating complex new derivatives to shift risk around the financial system. The market for these products is growing rapidly, both on futures and options exchanges and in private sales, which tend to be more complex and more lucrative. Credit derivatives already have a nominal value of almost $1 trillion, up from around $100 billion five years ago. They are forecast to top $3 trillion by 2005. The nominal value of over-the-counter derivatives now exceeds $100 trillion, 60% of which is handled by a mere five dealers, including J.P. Morgan and Citigroup. Derivatives and other tools of financial engineering can be used to manage risk better by hedging positions and transferring unwanted risk to a counterparty, which is what banks say they mostly use them for. However, those tools can also be used to increase risk, perhaps by a big margin, and there is a growing danger that this will be done accidentally.

"Emanuel Derman of Goldman Sachs describes much of what a financial engineer does as “a high-tech version of estimating the unknown cost of fruit salad from the known price of fruit, or often, in reverse, estimating the unknown cost of fruit from the known price of fruit salad”. A financial engineer can take the risk in, say, a bond and break it down into a series of smaller risks, such as that inflation will reduce its real value or that the borrower will default. These smaller risks can then be priced and sold, using derivatives, so that the bondholder keeps only those risks he wishes to bear. But this is not a simple task, particularly when it involves assets with risk exposures far into the future and which are traded so rarely that there is no good market benchmark for setting the price. Enron, for instance, sold a lot of those sorts of derivatives, booking profits on them straight away even though there was a huge question-mark over their long-term profitability."

Good For Something

Gary Stix has a hopeful piece about the benefits of anthrax. That's right, the benefits. The key section reads as follows:

"The toxin's breaking-and-entering strategy has not gone unnoticed by scientists seeking new ways to deliver vaccines into cells. And the lethality of one of the proteins has attracted the attention of investigators who have shown an interest in marshalling its killing power to combat tumors.

"The idea of using a notorious pathogen as a therapeutic tool did not immediately generate an enthusiastic audience. Yichen Lu, a researcher at the Harvard University School of Public Health, remembers telling the director of the vaccine branch of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in 1999 of his plans to use anthrax in an HIV vaccine. He described how a version of the toxin could be genetically engineered to eliminate its pathogenicity and how it could deliver a protein from the AIDS virus into an immune cell called an antigen-presenting cell. Once processed there, pieces of the protein would be displayed on the cell surface. That would induce production of killer T cells by the immune system that would then attack and kill the virus throughout the body. Lu remembers clearly the response of the FDA official when he suggested how important it was to move ahead with a safety test of the anthrax-derived vaccine on army soldiers: "She said, 'You're crazy.'"

Strategery

The journalistic smart set's reaction to Vice President Cheney's appearance on Meet The Press basically boils down to this: He's just saying that to divert attention our attention from the real scandal, which is that the Administration was forewarned about the attacks on the World Trade Center and The Pentagon and did nothing about it. You've probably read some of this already.

What is it about the smart set that makes them so stupid? Do they really believe that Vice President Dick Cheney would go on national television and talk about the virtual certainty of another attack because he wanted to divert attention away from a patently bogus story about Administration inaction. The Administration was a presidential signature away from declaring war on Al Qaeda the day before September 11th. Does the fact of that directive indicate that the Administration was oblivious to the threat? Does the fact that the United States was able to decimate the Taliban within eight weeks of the September 11 attacks indicate that they had made no preparations to conduct a war against Al Qaeda beforehand? Of course not.

The whole point of the "Bush Knew" brouhaha was and is to do political damage to the president. It has nothing to do with any interest in improving US intelligence capabilities. It has nothing to do with furthering the war effort. It has nothing to do with making the nation more secure. The sole purpose of this scandal creation operation is to undercut the foundation of President Bush's political support, which is and has been his leadership in the War against Terrorism.

The fact that the Democrats have embarked down this road, as a matter of political strategy, is breathtaking. In the event that Vice President Cheney and FBI Director Mueller are right, it may well be the most breathtakingly stupid strategy ever.

When and if the next attack comes, the reaction of the American electorate will be nuclear. They will demand that all available military options be pursued, the sooner the better. They will demand that Arab nationals be rounded up and deported. They will demand that anyone with any connection to any known Al Qaeda group or front, including so-called charities, be arrested immediately. And these demands will be non-negotiable.

America is the most ferocious military power in the history of mankind. Once aroused, the American electorate is absolutely ruthless in its pusuit of military victory. They will, as John F. Kennedy famously said, bear any burden and pay any price to bring down their enemies. And they will sanction the use of whatever weapons are necessary to get the job done. If you don't think so, ask the people of Dresden or Nagasaki or the Afghans who couldn't breath because the oxygen within a one square mile area had been sucked out of the air by a Daisy Cutter.

By shamelessly trying to politicize the systemic failure of US Intelligence prior to 9/11, the Democrats are embarking down a road that leaves them one terrorist attack away from political disaster. It's an extraordinarily risky strategy for a national political party that otherwise stands a reasonable chance of success in the mid-term elections and is likely to be at least competitive in the 2004 presidential race. More important, it is patently irresponsible.

This thing we are in is not a game. The chances that New York City will be hit again in the next year are probably better than 50-50. A suicide bomber in Grand Central Station would kill hundreds of people. A small-pox bomber would kill hundreds of thousands of people. Do the Democrats and their liberal press allies really want to be talking about "memo-routing" when this happens? Do they really want to engage the American public on the issue of the FBI/CIA paper trail, when sirens and red lights fill the night air in New York and body bags line the sidewalks?

Can they really be that stupid?

MiniPutt Two

A new, more difficult MiniPutt game has been posted at the Harvard site. You can access it by clicking here. Please do not email me your scores. Just have fun.

N.B.: Once you've landed on the site: click on "Practice" and the first hole comes up. After you've played that hole, click "continue" and the second hole will appear. And so on.