"Explosion without an objective is politics in its purest form."
-- Thomas Pynchon, Against the Day

It was said of George H.W. Bush that he was born on third base but thought he had hit a triple. We could say that John McCain takes himself for Roy Rogers but is really Gabby Hayes. (We realize this reference is lost on the addled youth.) By contrast, Senator McCain has compared Barack Obama to William Jennings Bryan, alas another figure all but lost to young denizens of the Internet.

McCain understands Bryan as a great speaker bereft of substance. Of course, all familiar with Senator McCain know that when it comes to the content of policy, as a Wall Street Journal profile once put it, "he gets lost in the tall mangroves."

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Now we have facts:

"More than 10 million viewers tuned into Wednesday's Democratic debate on ABC, making it the most-watched debate of the primary election season.

The debate, the first to air on a weeknight on a broadcast network, attracted an average of 10.7 million viewers between 8 and 10 p.m., according to Nielsen Media Research.

The debate topped the "reality" fare of "Deal or No Deal" on NBC and "Big Brother" on CBS during the 8 p.m. hour."

So from ABC's perspective, and certainly for George S and Charles G, the raucous, murderous, sharp-edged, animalistic idea-free style worked perfectly -- unless Nielsen also reported that many people turned off during the debate. I bet that didn't happen. Like the crowds of the ancient Coliseum, millions watched to see if vulpine George or ursine Charles would slash or bash to political death either of the two gladiators, or whether the two would otherwise finally conclude their andabatarian struggle, live, on the studio stage, with one fallen and the other triumphant.

So, blame the audience, ABC is concluding. They watched it, so they must have wanted it the way we gave it to them.

So . . . moving is pretty taxing, both physically and mentally. Almost all my stuff is in the new place, but now begins the daunting post-move stabilization and reconstruction process. I'm not looking forward to it, so why not a blog post? Now that the formerly booming coastal (coastal is normally qualified by including "and Florida" but of course Florida is on the coast notwithstanding the fact that Bush won the electoral votes ) housing market is no longer booming, a lot of people are concerned about a big bust. Since before I moved I was looking for a place to live, I am now in possession of a massive stockpile of anecdotal evidence -- plus my usual cunning logic -- with which to shed some light on the situation.

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As you may know, a while back I cowrote an article with my colleague Sam Rosenfeld called "The Incompetence Dodge." The subject was folks who supported the Iraq War, then came to recognize it was a disaster, and then came to blame its disastrous nature on the ineptitude of the Bush administration. This, we argue, is a mistake -- a dodge -- an effort to avoid culpability for the fact that the basic concept and premises of the war were mistaken.

As several readers have pointed out, we seem to be seeing a new variant of this as Israelis sour on Ehud Olmert in the wake of the Lebanon War. In this instance, I think the case against the "incompetence" theory is even clearer. Lots of people around the world suggested that Israel's campaign was ill-advised. And, to the best of my knowledge, absolutely none of us who said that made any reference to Olmert's competence or lack thereof in framing our critiques. Then the war turned out more-or-less exactly as the skeptics predicted . . . skeptics who had nothing to draw on but a general analysis of the situation.

Hey...so...my guest blogging at the TPM mothership is temporarily done, but I'll actually be back working that portfolio next week. Over the weekend, any blogging I get done will be here. The sad fact of the matter, however, is that I need to pack tomorrow and move on Sunday so posting may be pretty light in the scheme of things.

Is naming a restaurant Hitler's Cross worse than naming a bar KGB Bar? Discuss amongst yourselves.

Josh Bivens correctly notes that the extent to which public policy plays a role in pre-tax income inequality is probably going to have something to do with which sort of inequality we're talking about -- the top ten percent diverging from the bottom ninety, or the top 0.1 percent diverging from the bottom 99.9 percent. Meanwhile, I was sad to read this comment from Andrew Samwick on my theory that tax policy affects pre-tax income distribution:

I hadn't fully appreciated that a progressive tax system might be used to give lower-income workers a leg up in competing for the marginal unit of production. It remains an empirical question as to how important this might be over the last 25 years. I would have thought the effect to be small, compared to things like increasing global competition in product markets.

I would have thought that lots of people would have thought of that already. It doesn't seem like it should be too hard to model, right? Indeed, at first I thought I should be able to model it myself but actually I can't. Some of what I'm thinking, though, goes below.

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This Richard Cohen column reads almost like a joke. It's 1938! It's 1938! Appeasement! Appeasement! Bill Kristol and Charles Krauthammer, at a minimum, pull this schtick off with a certain rhetorical flair. Cohen doesn't even seem to be paying attention. In-depth diavlogging discussion of the use and abuse of historical analogies here.

In general, I'm against these kinds of analogies. Marx and Hegel aside history does not, in fact, repeat. Analogies to 1938 are especially pernicious. Adolf Hitler is, obviously, a very noteworthy historical figure and WWII a noteworthy period in world history. This is precisely because the things that happened during them time were extreme, weird, and largely unprecedented they idea that they're constantly recurring or likely to recur is odd.

Iran is set to make a proposal on the nuclear front today, while I believe it's become popular in the wingnutosphere to believe that we'll see a massive Iran-backed terrorist attack today. A more reasonable -- though quite pessimistic -- take on US-Iranian relations is provided by Brian Ulrich's review of Ali Ansari's Confronting Iran.

Alan Brinkley's review of a new book on Lyndon Johnson touches, of course, on the ever-present "two Johnsons" theme -- "At his best, Lyndon Johnson was one of the greatest of all American presidents . . . [b]ut Johnson was not always at his best . . . [h]e was, paradoxically, at once one of America’s most successful presidents and one of its most conspicuous failures."

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My friend, sometime colleague, etc. Mark Goldberg has a smart post up on the UN Dispatch blog about Darfur, and a last-ditch idea from Kofi Annan that might do some good if member states would back it.

Jay Matthews is writing about a very specific issue in the education policy field, but as Andrew Rotherham points out there's a general phenomenon here. Lots of journalism in America is done by and essentially for a very narrow socioeconomic slice of the country. That results in a lot of trend-style reporting which focuses exclusively on the goings-on of the sort of people likely to read the publication. That's okay, so far as it goes. Naturally, people who read Time are going to be disproportionately interested in the things that the sort of people who read Time are doing.

The trouble comes when attitudes and ideas shaped by that sort of reporting get displaced onto discussions about politics and public policy.

Mickey Kaus, further explicating his views on entitlement policy seems fundamentally driven by the idea that a move to universal health care would be very expensive and likely to result in "a larger tax burden than citizens are willing to bear." You can see why one might think that, but I'm not at all certain it's correct. The US government currently spends a phenomenal sum of money on health care by world standards which strongly suggests to me that there are significant savings that could be achieved through reforms.

What's more, the large number of people who currently get health care through their employers are already used to seeing a slice of money deducted from their paychecks to cover health insurance. I feel like people in that situation (say, me) wouldn't even really notice if that deduction were relabeled a "health insurance tax" rather than a "premium." The uninsured working poor surely wouldn't mind since any reasonable system would be giving them significantly more in benefits than they'd be paying in taxes. The folks likely to resent the change are the relatively small number of youngish, reasonably healthy people who currently don't have employer-sponsored health care and don't especially mind not having it since they don't have much in the way of health expenses. That's a not-entirely-trivial group of people, but it's a distinct minority and not a powerful political lobby.

All of which turns back to the basic point that when you're talking about universal health care you're not really talking about increasing the aggregate resources poured into American health care. There's already tons of money being spent on it. You're talking about redistributing the spending somewhat from richer to less-rich people and altering the path through which the money flows. If you believe (as I do) that a government-run insurance pool could realize significant savings vis-a-vis a series of private sector ones, then I think there's plenty of reason to be optimistic about ability to pay. The significant financial challenge has to do with covering the bills for old people, but that challenge exists one way or another thanks to Medicare (and the basic reality that senior citizens are largely uninsurable in the private sector) and has relatively little to do with whether or not we can afford to bring universal coverage to the under-65 crowd.

You see now and again these stories about conservatives growing disillusioned with the Bush administration, and you see them increasingly in recent months. These always seem to wind up leaning heavily on things being said by conservative pundits, however, and it's rarely clear to me exactly how consequential that is. I was glad to see that today's Washington Post had a story that draws that distinction: "Pundits Renounce The President". But how much does it matter? The rightwing punditocracy is, I think, pretty clearly an important asset to the GOP when they're all on the same page. But can it be influential in dissent? I sort of have my doubts, since it should be easy enough to locate and trot out some B-list dudes with more pro-Bush views no matter how disgruntled the current A-list may become.

Certainly from my perch in the lower-middle ranks of progressive punditry it's not at all clear to me that what liberal magazine writers and columnists think about this or that is an especially important factor in determining what happens in the world. One way or another, I will say that Joe Scarborough's "Is Bush an Idiot?" segment is quite good. Of course, I was calling Bush an idiot when doing so was at its very lowest level of coolness.

Paul Krugman writes that politics matters for the income distribution, citing the long-term trends in inequality and their close correlation with long-term political trends. Brad DeLong says he thinks this is wrong, political changes can and do have a large impact on after-tax income distribution but the trends show up strongly in pre-tax income. "I can't see the mechanism by which changes in government policies bring about such huge swings in pre-tax income distribution."

I note for the edification of readers that one thing I've learned since arriving in DC is that a difference of opinion on this subject is a major divide within the progressive economic policy community. Most mainstream economists -- including most liberals -- agree with DeLong. Politics and policy affect the secondary distribution (after tax and transfer) and what happens with the primary distribution is just out there. Leftier economists tend to say this is mistaken.

I would side with Krugman on this. The trend data is too striking to be ignored. If you have a phenomenon and are having trouble identifying the cause, the thing to do is to try harder to identify the cause, not assert that the phenomenon isn't happening. But what is the cause? I can think of some plausible stories.

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I'd always thought that only worked when there was lots of volcanic activity in the area, as in Iceland. According to Malcolm Gladwell and his dad, however, it just takes a hole in the ground and some pipes and can be done anyplace you have the space to dig the necessary trenches.

If you live in an urban area, it's hard not to notice the curious fact that no matter how African-American the city or neighborhood you're in is, the people running corner stores and dry cleaners are almost invariably immigrants (including, at least in DC, immigrants from Africa). Insofar as this phenomenon gets discussed at all, it tends to take on a rather offensive tone (suggesting, in essence, that if black people just dusted themselves off a little and acted more like Jews/Koreans/Bangladeshis/whomever then all would be well) but one way or another it's certainly noticeable and interesting.

And one of the great things about the blogosphere is that without even knowing somebody who's cite you read can turn out to have bona fide information about random subjects. Steven Teles, for example, turns out to have coedited a book called Ethnicity, Social Mobility and Public Policy in the US and UK and lays the whole thing out here.

Kevin Drum slams Jacques Chirac's apparent flip-flop over making a major French contribution to a beefed-up UNIFIL. I'm not so sure by any means. It seems to me that French diplomacy over the past couple of weeks has been fairly brilliant.

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The conclusion of Sabrina Tavernise's coverage of the Lebanese Army's deployment to southern Lebanon:

For Hezbollah, the army, seen as a largely impotent force, provides a comfortable and convenient cover for their work in southern Lebanon. One of the young men, in tinted sunglasses, said he supported the army’s deployment.

“It’s really good, let them come,” he said, untangling the rope. “We’re all Lebanese, it’s not a problem.”

So this war . . . all the Israelis killed . . . the even greater number of Arabs killed . . . Israel achieved, what, exactly? Condoleezza Rice delayed the implementation of a cease-fire agreement for weeks in order to do . . . what? I feel like the many people who were so busy slamming skeptics of Israel's policy really have a duty to address this. What went wrong? Was this really such a hot policy in retrospect? Were all of us saying this was leading to pointless bloodshed and not much else really just driven by our deep-seated Jew-hating?

You may remember those blessed days when administration officials were able to argue that though Baghdad and the surrounding areas were in chaos, most of Iraq was calm and stable. Well, things have gone down the drain in the south, too.

I've been kind of skeptical, personally, about all the optimism floating around town about the Democrats' chances of taking the House this fall. But if K Street's decided they need to start hedging their bets, that's definitely a data point in favor of thinking it might happen since it strikes me as worth putting some credence in predictions being made by people who are putting their money where their mouths are.

Of course the flipside of all of this is that it would really be nice to see Democrats wanting to take power in order to clean up the corrupt racket that the legislative process has become rather than aiming at getting a bigger piece of the action.

Before hating Joe Lieberman was the hip thing, there used to be a Senator by the name of John Breaux who was far and away America's Worst Democrat. And, apparently, he's still whoring around for big business trying to wreck America's domestic policy.

For the record yes, obviously George Allen was trying to use a racial slur against S.R. Sidarth. The reason you might not think it was a slur is that the slur in question was terribly obscure. It's obscure, however, because it's a French slur. And Allen's mother is . . . a white Frenchwoman who grew up in Tunisia, exactly the sort of person who would know all about French racial slurs. And Allen speaks French. And, of course, in Allen's youthful California days he was a white supremacist fond of flying the Stars and Bars.

There, again, for a southern person of a certain age to have an affection for the Confederate Flag might mean any number of things. But for a Californian to have an affection for the Confederate Flag isn't open to a lot of interpretation.