Via Instapundit, I came across this fascinating post by Kevin Drum of The Washington Monthly (an establishment liberal magazine out of Washington, DC). The question has been debated: Did we go to war without enough troops? Are we losing in Iraq because of the lack of manpower? To a rising number of critics (more and more of them on the Right these days, following Andrew Sullivan’s lead), the answer is obvious–and Rumsfeld’s the culprit whose head must roll to satisfy their anger over the supposed error which was borne of his headstrong stubbornness.

Admittedly, I’ve supported Rumsfeld and his assertion that you “go to war with the army you have”, but despite my bias, the not-enough-troops criticism has always seen too cheap and unsubstantiated to me. Now, from a liberal magazine, I have seen as good a refutation as there is:

Suppose Rumsfeld had agreed with guys like Eric Shinseki and proposed an invasion with more troops. How many could he have called on?

…[I]f we used every single active combat brigade of the Army and Marines — denuding our forces everywhere in the world to do it — and then filled up every possible National Guard and reserve brigade, we might scrape up about 500,000 troops.

Of course, no one seriously suggests that we should strip every last soldier from Europe, North Korea, and our other overseas deployments. Realistically, then, the maximum number of troops available for use in Iraq is probably pretty close to the number we have now: 300,000 rotated annually, for a presence of about 150,000 at any given time.

The only way to appreciably increase this is to raise the Army’s end strength by several divisions, and this is exactly what Kagan and Sullivan think Rumsfeld has been too stubborn about opposing. But as they acknowledge, doing this would take a couple of years — and as they don’t acknowledge, it would have made the war politically impossible. The invasion of Iraq almost certainly would never have happened if Rumsfeld had told Congress in 2002 that he wanted them to approve three or four (or more) new divisions in preparation for a war in 2004 or 2005.

…Kagan and Sullivan both supported the Iraq war, but it never would have happened if Rumsfeld had acknowledged that we needed 100,000 more troops than we had available at the time.For that reason, conservative critiques of Rumsfeld on these grounds strike me as hypocritical.

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If you’ve never seen this before, it’s well worth the long download time: Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” video done completely with legos. I probably should have posted this while Brendan was cramming for finals, but this is close enough. ;-)

(Via this nutcase, who also brings us video of crazy Domers playing soccer with a fireball. Please note that not all his links are SFW.)

In the 121st edition of The Game, Yale lost badly to their archrival Harvard, but restored some lustre to the rivalry nonetheless with a great prank.

A recent article led me to ponder this question: For those of you who are pro-choice and believe that abortion is not a good thing but nevertheless should remain legal, would you object to a law that mandated abortion clinics show modern ultrasounds of her fetus to every woman who is considering having an abortion? On what grounds?

What if the law mirrored gun-purchase laws and mandated a wait period of, say, one day after the initial consultation before she could go through with the abortion? Would any pro-choicers object to that, and why?

Personally I think both would be good ideas and would be worth funding, but I’d like to hear the pro-choice (or even more bizarre, the pro-life) argument against these potential policies. I would consider this actionable middle ground between pro-lifers and pro-choicers, so I would love to hear from anyone why these are bad ideas.

Matt Drudge is breaking a story that is to appear in tomorrow’s New York Times which includes a memo from new CIA boss Porter Goss stating, “As agency employees we do not identify with, support or champion opposition to the administration or its policies.” Belmont Club and others have discussed the CIA “purge” and covered some of the reaction to it, but I think Michael Ledeen has the best take on the whole controversy. Shedding no tears, he explains in his mythical conversation:

ML: Before we get into the details, I’ve got a quickie for you. I was reading a recent interview with Charles McCarry, the ex-spook who writes terrific books, and he said something quite extraordinary.

JJA: To wit?

ML: He said: “I never met a stupid person in the agency. Or an assassin. Or a Republican… They were, at least in the operations side where I was…wall-to-wall knee-jerk liberals. And they were befuddled that the left outside the agency regarded them as some sort of right-wing threat. Because they were the absolute opposite, in their own politics.”

JJA: Of course. I mean, they all came from Yale, which didn’t exactly preach Social Darwinism. And then remember that during the McCarthy purges, any leftist at State who could get to CIA, jumped, and Allen Dulles protected them all. In the Fifties and early Sixties, the State Department was much more hard-line than the agency.

ML: Well, I think they’ve caught up by now…

JJA: No doubt, no doubt. I see where you’re going.

ML: Yes, I’m sure you do. The CIA didn’t like Bush very much; they wanted him out. He was very reluctant to believe that at the beginning, but he worked it out, didn’t he?….

You can see where this is going.

(More after the jump)

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January 29, 2002:

I predict that in the years ahead Enron, not Sept. 11, will come to be seen as the greater turning point in U.S. society.

November 5, 2004:

Without the fading but still potent aura of 9/11, when the nation was ready to rally around any leader, [Bush] wouldn’t have won at all.

Elsewhere in the same article, Krugman says,

He’s a radical - the leader of a coalition that deeply dislikes America as it is. Part of that coalition wants to tear down the legacy of Franklin Roosevelt, eviscerating Social Security and, eventually, Medicare. Another part wants to break down the barriers between church and state. And thanks to a heavy turnout by evangelical Christians, Mr. Bush has four more years to advance that radical agenda….

But Democrats mustn’t give up the fight. What’s at stake isn’t just the fate of their party, but the fate of America as we know it.

Dane, David, Sean, Joe–will you finally agree that the man is unhinged?

This seriously made my morning. This is even better than Dole’s post-’96 ads, where he always spoke in 3rd person in TV ads.

Update: Also very amusing, and completely unrelated, is this neat little 2D animation music video. There’s no truth to the rumor that the song itself is based on Brendan’s teenage years. ;-)

Yet again I’ve come across a superb analysis of why Bush should win, this time by a self-described libertarian from New York (read that last part as my preemptive self-defense statement bracing for the inevitable disagreements from Sean that a real libertarian could actually support Bush).

Note: I’m only excerpting the pro-Bush subjects Megan McArdle/Jane Galt addresses, partly to piss off David, and partly to drive you to follow the link and read the whole thing if you want to read her pro-Kerry sentiments.

Extended excerpts follow:

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Washington Post has announced its winners for the best political blogs, and the results aren’t too surprising (Hey, where’s BrendanLoy.com? –ed. It fell out of favor with the masses by sidetracking into Red Sox news too often). Instapundit, Andrew Sullivan, Talking Points Memo, OxBlog, Little Green Footballs, Wonkette, Daily Kos, INDC Journal, ScrappleFace, Jesus’ General, Eschaton, and James Lileks all were recognized. However, the shocker has to be National Review Online, which cleaned up by tallying awards for The Corner (four) and Kerry Spot (one).

Bravo to Mark Steyn for walloping Kerry for his inane positions in this campaign. Massive excerpting follows:

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As the discussion goes back and forth between the usual suspects on the previous post, Why Bush should win, I’ve come across another gem of wisdom that reflects what I’ve been feeling.

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I’m quite sick of this election and want it to just be over already. I really don’t think anyone’s mind will change much between now and November, so we might as well just get the damn thing over already (and no, a sagging stock market and ridiculous gas prices this close to Election Day are not making me nervous).

Still, while it won’t change anyone’s mind here on who to vote for, I believe I have come across the most convincing case for Bush yet penned (only because I’m too lazy and harried these days to compose it myself). I eagerly await Andrew Sullivan’s promised rebuttal, but in the meantime, I would like to highlight the part of Belgravia Dispatch’s argument that accurately reflects why my scorn for Kerry has only increased these past couple of weeks:

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Okay okay, so that’s not what the president said (or almost said) when he flubbed the line, “We can’t send mixed messages”, but for me that was the highlight of the debate entertainment-wise.

Which goes to show, I suppose, just how substantive, serious, and outstanding this debate really was. It’s not just Jonah Goldberg–this was the best presidential debate in decades. Perhaps that is because the seriousness of the time calls for a serious substantive debate, or perhaps it’s just because neither candidate is a great orator. Whatever the case, I was impressed with the format, with the questions, and with the content. I seriously don’t know what all the pre-debate media bitching was about, as the two campaigns seem to definitely have hit upon a winner as far as formats go. Additionally, each man presented a clear, distinct vision for how he thinks we should move forward. For those who failed to see the difference between the candidates last time around, I don’t know how anyone can make that mistake now.

So who won?

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It’s been interesting to see Democrats, in the past couple years or so, resort to attacking Republicans with the straw-man charge that Republicans are attacking the Democrats’ patriotism, specifically men such as Max Cleland and John Kerry. Republicans–and especially the president and vice president–have been very careful to take the high road by lauding Kerry’s patriotic service in Vietnam, and even the scorched-Earth speech by Zell Miller at the RNC contained the disclaimer, “It is not their patriotism — it is their judgment that has been so sorely lacking.”

Yet maybe it was just the evil Republican in me, but I always have questioned Kerry’s and many other Democrats’ patriotism. I could try to justify my willingness to question Kerry’s patriotism to the liberal-leaning commenters and bloggers on this site, but thankfully someone has made the case for why we should question Kerry’s patriotism far better than I can. There is simply far too much excellent analysis to excerpt, so as they say, read the whole thing.

There’s a second rumination that’s been playing in my head recently. Glenn Reynolds indicated yesterday that the InstaWife was falling into the trap of thinking Kerry must be ahead of Bush in Tennessee because she’s seeing more Kerry signs and bumperstickers, when in reality the polls show Kerry trailing Bush by dramatic margins there. This got me thinking though, as I’ve noticed even in my area of Orange County (the quintessential Red-State-within-a-Blue-State), I’ve seen just as many Kerry signs as–if not more than–Bush signs. I also wondered, What gives?

After thinking about it for a while, it kind of occurred to me that maybe the parallel to the ‘64 presidential election didn’t end after all with the primary defeat of Howard Dean. Recall that when Howard Dean was storming towards winning the presidential nomination, many people saw a rerun of Barry Goldwater and feared his winning the nomination for precisely that reason. Well, imagine if you will that somehow the Republican bigwigs in 1964 got control of their party in time to head off Goldwater’s candidacy and elected a more acceptable candidate like, oh, say, Richard Nixon instead. Would the defeat have been just as devastating, or might Nixon have come closer to pulling off the victory? My hunch tells me that Nixon would still have lost to LBJ, perhaps by almost as large a margin as Goldwater; the base would not have been nearly as emotionally fired up, and LBJ would have coasted to victory on the memory of JFK’s assassination regardless. The long-term damage would have been that the rebirth of conservatism within the Republican Party would likely have been postponed, perhaps indefinitely. Still, it’s possible that at least in that particular election, the Republican hardcore would have plastered their cars and such with Nixon bumperstickers, and for a while it would seem that LBJ was in danger of losing, given Nixon’s narrow defeat in a controversial election four years prior.

Something similar seems to be brewing here. The Democratic base certainly is not fired up about John Kerry, and Dean appears to have been the Dems’ Goldwater, but instead the party apparatchiks were able to head off the certain disaster that would have occurred had Dean been nominated. Yet perhaps they also have headed off the Dems’ ideological New New Left rebirth and left the party to wane dangerously for the next decade until they can once again discover their core principles and figure out how to once again make them attractive to the electorate (European leftists certainly haven’t had as much trouble in this regard). But for now, we see lots of Kerry bumperstickers and Bush hatred in the media, blinding us to the inevitable fact that the lessons of 9/11 are holding with this electorate, and a heedless Kerry will therefore go down in flames. And it won’t be pretty.

I rarely watch TV news, so I didn’t see the much-discussed 60 Minutes II episode last night. However, following some links from Drudge, it appears that some of the memos CBS relied upon were fakes. See here, here, and here, for starters. This is pretty damning on CBS–and Kerry’s campaign by extension–if this is true. We already know that Ben Barnes is carrying water for Kerry and is very biased–if not totally lying (see the various links on Captian Ed’s blog)–but if the memos turn out to be false, this backfire will significantly help Bush.