On abortion. I take murder seriously, very seriously. I don’t require a Constitutional amendment spelling out the specifics of murder. And so on. What is it about abortion that can’t be dealt with by statute? What requires a specifically Constitutional solution? The definition of a fetus as a person? Let me observe that a) this is the most contentiously religious/cultural question involved in the entire debate, and one I’d suggest we’re all better off leaving to individual judgement and b) a Constitutional solution might even have implications that anti-abortion advocates would find uncomfortable. For example, if you put language into the Constitution, fundamental language, that defines the fetus as a person, surely that casts doubt one even the “abortion in the case of danger to the mother’s health” interventions. It surely invites a major slew of derivative interventions into the state management of pregnancy. And so on. There are reasons to doubt just on that level alone whether it’s a good idea to make this a Constitutional rather than statutory change. (This is assuming you’re anti-abortion in the first place.)

I seem to remember some very similiar arguments about the ERA, which today I would generally agree with.

More importantly, I don’t see this Administration as even remotely sincere in their efforts in this regard. It’s bread and circuses, a toss to its political base. In fact, it reinforces my feeling of their total lack of sincerity about their “war claims”: a genuine war president would put national unity at the absolute imperative top of his list, unless the war was a civil one, as in Lincoln’s case.

1) “Much of what is going to happen on the global scale of this conflict is not readable in the daily press of events, only in the slow accumulation of changes, movements, flows of money and information and organization. This has been one of my chief complaints all along about both the rhetoric and concrete policies of the Bush Administration.”

This recent Swift revelation is precisely about following “flows of money.” Isn’t this program, therefore, something you would support? Wasn’t the action of the NYT and LAT in revealing it against what you support? Or is accumulating knowledge about flows of money not what you were talking about?

2) You refer to the trivial statutory goals of abortion policy. Those of us who are pro-life cannot take your complaints about liberty and virtue seriously so long as you talk about the murder of millions as trivial.

So scary and so true.

This could be the best move politically. But, I don’t think incompetence is the problem with the Iraq war. Invading Iraq was a bad idea for reasons we knew about in 1990. There wasn’t some competent way to invade and ocuppy Iraq that would avoid our current problems.

Making the case for troop withdrawl is a pretty good move for the Democrats now. The worst thing for them politically is for bush, aided by democrat silence, to keep the status quo for 3 years and then the democrats have to face McCain in 2008 who wants to raise troop levels in Iraq. If our occupation is “incompetent”, it is hard to argue against raising troop levels.