George Bush is going to make John Kerry look like a pure-D, grade-A, first-class jackass. And I am so positively full of delight and anticipation that I can hardly bear my own self right now.

A buddy of mine in college was taking ROTC classes. When he graduated, he would become a lieutenant in the Army. I asked him one day what he'd learned in class that week. "We learned how to cross a minefield," he told me. I had no idea how one might go about this, so I asked him how you do it.

"You turn to your sergeant," he said, "and you say, 'Sergeant! Get these men across that minefield.'"

I was at the Kitty Kelley book party last week--don't ask--and an unpleasant character sidled up to me, with clammy hands and Gollum eyes, and asked, "So I hear you've got the goods on...?" It was one Michael Rogers, the new Robespierre of the gay rights movement, moving in on his latest attempt to "out" some traitor or other to the gay cause. I demurred. The only goods I have are on myself, and I have become a little difficult to "out" over the years, mainly because every conceivable part of my private and public life has already been exposed and attacked by the very gay activists who now want to enlist my collusion against others. Sorry, Michael. No deal.

And on the face of it, the obvious hypocrisy of a few does seem to merit accountability. If Congressman Ed Schrock is seeking gay sex on phone lines in Virginia, it's probably hypocritical for him to be calling for stringent enforcement of the military's ban on openly gay servicemembers, or for banning marriage rights to his fellow homosexuals. But the key word there is: probably. There is an obvious disjunction between Schrock's public statements and his private alleged actions. But is it hypocrisy?

Anyone who knows the psychological torment of gay men in their fifties or sixties must surely understand that things are often a little more complicated than that. Gay men who have lived their lives in shame and deception may not have come to terms in any profound way with the inner conflicts that are propelling their outward actions. They may be in such acute denial that they are barely aware of their deceptions. They may have split their psyches in so many different ways that their super-ego is scarcely aware of what their id is up to. Or they may somehow believe they are not gay; or they are doing the minimum necessary to keep their lives in one dysfunctional piece; or they may be fully aware they are gay inside while cynically advancing their political self-interest at the expense of other gay people.

Malice can only beget malice ... outing Schrock's cruelty doesn't end the cycle; it perpetuates it. Is Ed Schrock now an advocate of gay rights? Is his successor in his Virginia district likely to be any better? All we know now is that a) some gay men are so screwed up that they happily persecute other gays and b) other gay men are happy to persecute them as well. Has this advanced the argument for equal marriage rights? Has it made the story of gay people more understandable and accessible to the straight people we need to persuade? Hardly.

I found the Time magazine diction about [House Minority Leader Nancy] Pelosi sexist. The article described her as having "come unglued" on hearing of the plan. "Coming unglued" is the wrong image here. She didn't go hysterical and fall apart. If you were going to be glib, you could have described her as "livid" or "going ballistic." But such journalistic buzzwords for alarm and anger are reserved for men (no doubt the phallic connotations of intercontinental ballistic missiles help gender the image). Pelosi did not become "unglued." Rather, she intervened forcefully and effectively. She appears to have mobilized a bipartisan "powerful women" network with Rice, whom she strong-armed (another simile not usually used of women). Of course, she also was in a position to mobilize the Democrats in Congress across gender boundaries.

Attacks over the past two weeks have killed more than 250 Iraqis and 29 U.S. military personnel, according to figures released by Iraq's Health Ministry and the Pentagon. A sampling of daily reports produced during that period by Kroll Security International for the U.S. Agency for International Development shows that such attacks typically number about 70 each day. In contrast, 40 to 50 hostile incidents occurred daily during the weeks preceding the handover of political authority to an interim Iraqi government on June 28, according to military officials.

At their joint news conference, Bush seized on Allawi's comments to reinforce his own campaign positions, including that the Iraq war was linked to the U.S.-declared war on terrorism, that progress was being made in containing the insurgency and that the present strategy was the correct one.

"Freedom is winning," Bush told reporters assembled in the Rose Garden.

On Wednesday, there were 28 separate hostile incidents in Baghdad, including five rocket-propelled grenade attacks, six roadside bombings and a suicide bombing in which a car exploded at a National Guard recruiting station, killing at least 11 people and wounding more than 50.

[T]he cities of Amarah in the southern province of Maysan and Samawah in Muthanna province, also in the south, had long been relatively free of violence but are now experiencing frequent attacks, the reports indicate.

There also has been an unusual spike in the number of attacks to the north of the capital. More attacks have been reported in the northern cities of Mosul, Samarra and Tikrit over the past two weeks than in Fallujah and Ramadi, two areas of frequent fighting in Anbar.

Military officials contend, however, that does not mean the restive areas west of Baghdad -- the area known as the Sunni Triangle -- are no longer insurgent strongholds. The likely explanation, the officials said, is that U.S. Marines stationed in Anbar have sharply reduced their patrolling, making them less vulnerable to roadside attacks. But that strategy, officials say, has allowed insurgent cells to expand in the province.

"There are fewer attacks here because we're out on the road less," an officer at the Marine headquarters near Fallujah said on condition of anonymity. "But you shouldn't conclude from that that things are any safer."

The security situation has grown so dire that many of the few remaining nongovernmental aid organizations left in Iraq are making plans to withdraw. The United Nations, which was supposed to help organize the national elections, has just 30 employees in the country, all of whom are quartered in the U.S.-controlled, fortified Green Zone. Foreign journalists, who used to roam the country, are now largely restricted by safety concerns to Baghdad hotels surrounded with concrete walls and barbed wire.

"When we leave home, we never know if we're going to return home alive or not," said Mohammed Kadhim, a taxi driver.

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The No. 2 official at the State Department said Friday that the elections planned for January in Iraq must be ``open to all citizens,'' contradicting Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld who suggested the day before that voting might not be possible in the more-violent areas.

The Trail©

The Trail©

The Trail©

True Courage

From the Bar©

No matter how meritorious, [Kerry's Vietnam record] is a rather slender reed upon which to build a Presidential campaign. Or at least that seemed to be the Democratic consensus between 1992 and 2000.

Iraq was playing the Chess game, and eliminating someone the RIFs were treating as a major piece. It was also about shifting the front line back to the Middle East, _instead_ of the Continental U.S. If a potential terrorist is getting shot or blowing himself up in Baghdad or Fallujah, he isn't doing it in downtown Poughkeepsie, Butte Montana, Dallas Texas, or Los Angeles-and the Americans he might be going after can and will shoot back, unlike the residents of Chicago, Baltimore, or Boston. Virtually ANY nation in the Middle East would have sufficed, but we had a pretext to use Iraq, and a sentiment within the Uniformed Services that the job was started and left unfinished (also a popular sentiment to that effect in much of what folk like you tend to think of as "Flyover country", or "Hillbillyland").

1000 Words©

1000 Words©

A Well-Managed Freedom

MOSCOW, Sept. 13 -- President Vladimir Putin announced plans Monday for a "radically restructured" political system that would bolster his power by ending the popular election of governors and independent lawmakers, moves he portrayed as a response to this month's deadly seizure of a Russian school.

Under his plan, Putin would appoint all governors to create a "single chain of command" and allow Russians to vote only for political parties rather than specific candidates in parliamentary elections. ... The newest moves take a vision he calls "managed democracy" to a new level.

The danger to political dissent is acute where the Government attempts to act under so vague a concept as the power to protect "domestic security." Given the difficulty of defining the domestic security interest, the danger of abuse in acting to protect that interest becomes apparent.

On the Patriot Act, Edwards said some provisions "went too far" and should be repealed, but other actions of the Bush administration that have been blamed on the Patriot Act have simply been Attorney General John Ashcroft interpreting the Act the way he sees fit.

John Kerry came up to West Virginia on Labor Day to give a speech. I've gone into the Kerry-Edwards 04 (KE04) headquarters and charmed a couple of the staff. So I got to volunteer for the speech.

I got a ride with a couple of children of the sixties who have gracefully made the transition to liberal suburban soccer moms. So we were driving an SUV, but at least there were a half-dozen of us carpooling in it. It was a painfully early hour in the day. I had to get up at four-thirty, something that did not please my roomates one little bit. Worst of all, no coffee.

We got to the site at six-fifteen. It was a Labor Day festival held every year by the local mine workers union. The sheriff's deputies doing security had never had a presidential candidate speak, so they were being a bit overzealous. They kept us there for twenty minutes, running us around to see if we could park or if we had clearance, calling KE04 HQ and generally being dumb hickville sheriffs. Meanwhile, every five minutes they'd let a large truck through without searching it, because these were vendors that came every year.

Yuck. Well, when we finally got in and met the volunteer coordinators, I got assigned to the press advance team. This is the important group, the people making sure that everything is set up for the traveling reporters that are accompanying the candidate to his speeches. What the press needs is the most important consideration in any campaign stop, and I soon discovered that every single other aspect of the campaign stop—the audience, the speakers, even the security arrangements—are of less importance than making sure the press has a good time.

We designed a special “chute” of fences around the event that would allow the reporters to travel from the buses to the main riser and cut risers (the two platforms the press watch the speech from) and then to the press tent where they eat expensive catering and file their stories. We put up dozens of signs to keep the reporters where they were supposed to be and strategically placed volunteers where we could make sure the press was kept in the right place. The general idea I got was that the reporters were to be treated in much the same way you would treat a drunken Gorbachev or very expensive cattle: the utmost respect must be given, but under no circumstances can they be allowed to exercise their own judgment.

The preparations took most of the morning. I was assigned to be a fax runner. A nearby daycare had been taken over as a staff holding room, and fax machine was to be monitored at all times for incoming press releases, which I would then make quite a few copies of and distribute to the press tent. Two other volunteers were on fax duty, and for them the day went something like this. First they tried to get the fax machine working. It was broken. They found another fax and plugged it in, to try and get it working. A friend in Charleston faxed them a test sheet and they informed the advance staff that the machine was working. KE04 staff in D.C. tried to fax us a press release. The fax wasn’t working. They found a third fax and plugged it in. The friend in Charleston faxed them another test sheet. They told the advance staff the fax was working. D.C. tried again. No luck. Finally, someone who worked at the daycare showed up and told them that the phone lines did have long distance service. So they had to find somewhere else. They got a working fax machine in a county library across the street. They got someone in Philly to send a test page and, lo and behold, a working fax machine. When they went to inform the advance staff, the event was over and everyone was cleaning up.

Fortunately, I extricated myself from that debacle very early on and attached myself to a member of the advance staff who greatly needed an assistant. So I spent most of my day running messages back and forth between people of importance. This is how I pissed off the secret service. There were several checkpoint where anyone without a clearance pin had to empty their pockets and get frisked and gone over with one of those wands. Because I was running messages between areas on either side of one checkpoint, I had to get searched dozens of times. One of the agents on Kerry’s detail knows me by name now. Well, he knows my by the nickname ‘Utah,’ anyway.

Unfortunately, I pissed off far more secret service agents then I got to like me. At one point, we had to move something called Soapbox™, a piece of wireless internet technology used by reporters to file their stories. There were some last minute changes in the plan (in fact, the entire day was pretty much nothing but last minute changes in the plan, assuming we had one in the first place) and I ended up driving a campaign car backwards through the motorcade, where I wasn’t cleared to be in the first place. The suits got tetchy.

“Why were you driving backwards?” one asked me. My response wasn’t all it could have been.

“Did I drive alright? I haven’t driven a car since January.”

At one point, I found out that part of the daycare center was going to be a staging area for the SWAT team. I decided to be considerate and left the following note:

“The SWAT team is using the next room. Please do not be alarmed when several heavily armed men barge through. This is normal, apparently.”

There was a last minute change in plans and Kerry ended up using the daycare center as a hole. A place to make phone calls, do a little work before moving on to the next stop. I like to think he read my note.

That, unfortunately, would be as close as I got to the candidate I was working for. I was a hundred feet away in the audience while he was up on the platform, but only at a couple of points when I was running from the press tent to the staff hold and back. From a hundred feet away, the only impression you can get is that he’s tall. (Fortunately, that may be enough. We all know the old chestnut about the taller candidate.)

While Kerry was giving his speech, I was in a nearby building watching the speech he was giving at the same time I was making photocopies of the speech he was giving to give to the reporters he was giving it to.

That’s probably a good metaphor for something.


Here I am watching Kerry on TV, when he was just outside the door...

Some of my old pictures are down. I'll try and get them back up, though it's not my number one priority.

I will add one thing more. And that is the personal sadness I feel that this president who praises freedom wishes to take it away from a whole group of Americans who might otherwise support many parts of his agenda. To see the second family tableau with one family member missing because of her sexual orientation pains me to the core. And the president made it clear that discriminating against gay people, keeping them from full civic dignity and equality, is now a core value for him and his party. The opposite is a core value for me. Some things you can trade away. Some things you can compromise on. Some things you can give any politician a pass on. But there are other values - of basic human dignity and equality - that cannot be sacrificed without losing your integrity itself. That's why, despite my deep admiration for some of what this president has done to defeat terror, and my affection for him as a human being, I cannot support his candidacy. Not only would I be abandoning the small government conservatism I hold dear, and the hope of freedom at home as well as abroad, I would be betraying the people I love. And that I won't do.

Zell Miller's address will, I think, go down as a critical moment in this campaign, and maybe in the history of the Republican party. I kept thinking of the contrast with the Democrats' keynote speaker, Barack Obama, a post-racial, smiling, expansive young American, speaking about national unity and uplift. Then you see Zell Miller, his face rigid with anger, his eyes blazing with years of frustration as his Dixiecrat vision became slowly eclipsed among the Democrats ... I'm not easy to offend, but this speech was gob-smackingly vile...

Appealing to the crudest form of patriotism and the easiest smears is wrong when it is performed by the lying Michael Moore and it is wrong when it is spat out by Zell Miller. Last night was therefore a revealing night for me. I watched a Democrat at a GOP Convention convince me that I could never be a Republican. If they wheel out lying, angry old men like this as their keynote, I'll take Obama. Any day.

New York, New York

The best moment of the night came when Rudy Giuliani and McCain took the stage and led the crowd in "New York, New York."