Sometimes I wish I were a psychologist. I’m sure there’s a clinical description of the condition where people begin to feel a sense of ownership of things that are of interest to them, even though they’re not directly involved. For example, people (and by people, I’m referring to myself) spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about what kinds of personnel moves their favorite baseball team should make in order to get to the World Series. I find that I’m addicted to this sort of thinking, and I’m not sure it’s a very productive use of my time. I’m always thinking about what John Kerry needs to do to win the Presidential election, or how companies that I like could improve their products, or what we ought to be doing to improve the plight of various people in Africa. Heck, I even spend time thinking about how some TV shows I watch could be better than they are. And really, none of those things are in my sphere of influence, which is obviously small.

The entertainment value and mental stimulation of pondering big problems is the reward, but I can’t help but think that it’s probably not the best use of my time. In that sense, I can see why many people simply choose to ignore politics (among other subjects). If you can’t affect something personally, what’s the use in spending much time on it? I ought to be more like that, I think.

I’ve sort of reached a point of peace about this Presidential election. Not to be too mean, but I have begun to feel like it’s a referendum on the intelligence and attention span of the American people. It seems to me that to support President Bush at this point, you have to basically believe that everything reported in the news is simply untrue. Here’s an example, a quote from Today’s Papers:

The Washington Post and New York Times lead with the most violent day in Iraq in months. At least four suicide car bombings and “a series of tightly sequenced attacks” (NYT) killed dozens of Iraqis as well as three Polish soldiers. Early morning reports citing health officials say at least 110 were killed, including about 35 in Baghdad. About a dozen Iraqis were killed–including a young girl and an al-Arabiya reporter–when a U.S. helicopter fired on a crowd gathered around a destroyed Bradley armored fighting vehicle. Six GIs were wounded in the initial attack on the Bradley.

The military said the chopper only fired after it took fire from the crowd. The NYT leaves it at that. The Post, though, cites a Reuters cameraman at the scene who disputed that account, saying nobody in the crowd was firing. The al-Arabiya reporter who was killed had been broadcasting live and the footage played throughout the day. Spots of blood were on the lens as the reporter said, “Please help me, I’m dying.”

The Post says inside GIs retook the northern city of Tal Afar. They were expecting a big fight but met almost no resistance or guerrillas. “There’s some good news in there, and there’s probably some bad news,” said one commander. He added that there are plans on reinstalling a local council, but it’s going tough since the town’s 600-man police force has, as the WP puts it, “dissolved.” Despite the reported lack of fighting, early morning reports say 50 people were killed in Tal Afar yesterday.

The NYT mentions in passing that 10 Iraqis were killed in heavy fighting in Ramadi. Nobody else seems to flag it, but the fighting could have particular significance since the military in Ramadi had been boasting of a peace deal that could be used a model.

There was also what the LAT calls “hours of mortar fire” on Baghdad’s fortified Green Zone. There were no reports of injuries. Last month, as the NYT says, there were an average of 87 insurgent attacks per day throughout the country, the highest of the occupation.

The WP and LAT both report on departing swipes taken by the outgoing Marine general who was charge of the province around Fallujah: Lt. Gen. James Conway says he opposed April’s attack on the city—and the later retreat–but was overruled by higher-ups. “After the contractor incident, we were told that we had to attack Fallujah,” said Conway. “I think we certainly increased the level of animosity that existed, and we’re living with that.” Various news reports have said the White House ordered the invasion. Neither paper thinks Conway is Page One Worthy.

Nobody fronts rioting in the western Afghanistan town of Herat, where a mob sacked U.N. offices and at least four demonstrators were killed and another 50 wounded, apparently by Afghan soldiers. About a dozen GIs were also wounded by rocks. The mob was protesting—if you call it that—the removal of Herat’s governor (and warlord), Ismail Khan. “They were shouting ‘Death to America,’ ‘Death to Karzai,’ ‘Death to the army,’ ” said one Afghan soldier.

I think that there’s a widespread lack of understanding in this country of just how bad things are right now in Iraq. I have been saying for a long time that I think there’s a good chance that today is as good as it will ever be for us in Iraq, in other words, that things just get worse every day. Nothing in the months since I started saying that has changed my mind. I wonder what the polls would look like if there were widespread belief that our effort in Iraq had already failed.

So, is this image a Rorschach inkblot or what? In my interpretation, this picture should be called “Instinctive Republican response to dissent.”

I thought I’d post a little something about the Bush National Guard documents. People say they’re fake. I say, who cares? Why are Democrats so obsessed with this issue? Bush’s record as President should be enough to boot him out of office, why dwell on this 30 years ago stuff? Here’s what uber-analyst Charlie Cook has to say about the election a couple of weeks ago:

A week when the focus is on the economy and jobs, or on Iraq and casualties, the management of the war, and weapons of mass destruction is a good week for Kerry and a bad week for Bush. When the focus is on almost anything else, it’s very likely to be a good week for Bush and a bad week for Kerry.

I think that Bush’s National Guard service is included in “almost anything else.” Keep your eye on the ball, Democrats. This fight can and should be won on the substantive issues.

Update: EJ Dionne correctly identifies the scandal upon which Democrats should pounce. You know, the one where President Bush told us a bunch of stuff that wasn’t true and then played upon the fears that he and his administration drummed up to gain support for invading Iraq. Oh, and the other lies about how Iraqis loved Americans and couldn’t wait for us to run their country.

Colby Buzzell, an infantryman serving in Iraq, has run into problems since his commanders found out about his weblog. It’s a shame. His weblog was one of those things that you read but don’t link to, out of fear that it will be shut down. Looks like it got shut down either way. For what it’s worth, aside from the articles about combat, I found his most interesting feature to be the emails he received from readers and his responses to them. One reader accused him of being a fake because he had a picture of a soldier in Vietnam on his home page, not realizing that the picture was of the cover of The Smiths album “Meat is Murder.”

Colin Powell came out and said that the Sudanese government is committing genocide in the Darfur region, leaving us with the question of what to do about it. The Sudanese, of course, reject the idea of international peacekeepers. They want to continue the genocide unmolested. Various countries on the UN Security Council are not on board because getting oil from the Sudan is more important to them than saving the lives of some people in Africa. The US isn’t going to get too heavily involved because we’re too busy turning Iraq into a beacon of liberty and democracy that will give Sudan something to aspire to. My recommendation would be to start training and arming the Darfur refugees, and let the Sudanese government know that we’re doing it. The international community isn’t going to do anything for these people, and with some guns and training they will at least have a fighting chance against the Janjaweed. That may sound like an unorthodox recommendation coming from a liberal such as myself, but given the lack of better options, enabling these people to defend themselves seems like a better alternative than many others. It’s hard not to think back on Rwanda when you look at what’s going on in the Sudan today, and the thing that finally did enable the Tutsis to end their persecution at the hands of the Hutu majority was their willingness and ability to wage a military campaign against them.

How come the people responsible for the RSS feeds from MSDN don’t read Chad Dickerson’s column or weblog?

Today, I noticed that you can’t right click on the registration page at projo.com (the site for the Providence Journal) to get a context menu. Why? bugmenot.com. Or at least that’s what I assume, since I was trying to use the bugmenot.com browser extension to find a login for the site. I thwarted their evil scheme by opening bugmenot.com in another window and typing in their URL manually. Take that.

This weekend when I was travelling, I tuned in to CNN Headline News to see how much damage hurricane Frances did to Florida, and what did I see? Footage of John Kerry windsurfing. Windsurfing may be a fun and invigorating activity, and may even be an extreme sport, but when you windsurf, you look like a dork. Or at least you do if you’re not doing flips or other tricks that I assume the extreme windsurfers do. So there’s the Democratic candidate for President, the guy who everybody says is about to get buried by Bush, in the most effete region of the country, dressed in a wetsuit, windsurfing.

It was then that I realized that Kerry isn’t afraid of this Bush guy. He never really seemed scared in the Democratic primary when everybody wrote him off, and he hasn’t given the impression of being afraid in the general election, either. I think that’s why so many other Democrats have been panicing — because Kerry hasn’t been. When you look at the circumstances, August was foreordained to be Kerry’s worst month. The Kerry campaign said they weren’t going to spend money in August because the Bush people were able to raise money in August and they were not (due to the intersection of campaign finance laws and convention scheduling), that was going to cost Kerry a few points in the polls. The media’s ugly flirtation with the swiftvets cost Kerry as well. And then the month ended with the RNC smearfest.

The situation was ripe for panic. And yet, Kerry was windsurfing. Not clearing brush, or hunting big game, or engaging in some other swing state approved activity to show that he’s manly and decisive and sufficiently serious. Maybe he knows something we don’t, or maybe he doesn’t and he just doesn’t care, or maybe he’s in denial. But if you want to talk about your great acts of political courage, windsurfing off the coast of Nantucket when everybody on TV is dogging you out for not shifting your campaign to Defcon 5 has to be up there.

The conventional wisdom for the past month or two has been that we failed to stop terrorists from attacking us on September 11, 2001 because of structural problems with our intelligence and law enforcement apparatus. That’s what the 9/11 Commission told us (or at least, recommended that we change). Now the smart people seem to be saying that the problem wasn’t the rules, or the bureaucracy, but rather the people involved. That makes the most sense to me.