The twin obsessions in Washington right now about Iraq and the continuing pandemic of GOP scandals have obscured the once and future obsession of George W. Bush’s efforts to reshape the Supreme Court. To be sure, Samuel Alito’s nomination has yet to undergo Senate Judiciary Committee hearings, which is why few senators from either party have taken definitive positions. But as Ryan Lizza points out on The New Republic‘s site today, the gradual build-up of evidence about Alito’s strong antagonism to Roe v. Wade is taxing the abilities of administration spinmeisters who want to keep this nomination in The Roberts Zone.Like a lot of observers, I’ve long felt Alito’s prospects for a relatively easy confirmation depended on whether he is perceived as another Scalia (scary conservative judicial activist) or as another Roberts (reassuring conservative judicial incrementalist). His handlers have done a pretty good job of keeping the dial turned towards the Roberts model, mainly by stressing his calm temperament and geniality; I guess the planted axiom is that Nice Guys Don’t Overturn Abortion Rights.But as Lizza notes, Alito’s growing paper trail of outspoken hostility to Roe, and especially the internal memo he wrote his colleagues at the Justice Department laying out a stealth strategy for ridding the Constitution of abortion rights, are stepping on his current message. And the rejoinder that Alito’s appeals court decisions upholding Roe as precedent show his deep respect for stare decisis is, as Lizza also notes, a crock: lower courts do not have the option of overturning Supreme Court decisions, but Supreme Courts most definitely do.Thus, even as Washington and the whole political world look elsewhere, the probability that the Alito nomination will hang fire is slowly growing. And after the Miers fiasco, accompanied by a growing sense among conservatives that time’s beginning to run out on their tainted ascendancy, Alito’s handlers may not have the wiggle room to make too many dubious assurances that the putative justice might well turn out to be a vote to sustain Roe. Another nice feature of Lizza’s analysis is that he shares my redundantly expressed view that any judicial, much less cultural, conservative reflexively thinks of Roe as the mother of all abominations. There’s absolutely no reason to think Samuel Alito thinks otherwise, and a lot of evidence to suggest his views on Roe are exactly what you’d expect.Now, there are two arguments you often hear in Democratic circles on this subject that sound initially plausible but which, in my opinion, are dangerously off-course. The first is that Republicans actually don’t want to overturn Roe because it would produce a political backlash once state legislatures and governors had to actually decide whether to support or repeal basic abortion rights. The second is that Democrats should smile upon a reversal of Roe, for the same reasons.The first argument, even if you buy it, suggests that Republican politicians can perpetually keep cultural conservatives running around the political track like greyhounds chasing a rabbit that can never be caught. Sure, some GOP pols may hope that’s true, but now, at the moment the Right has prayed and dreamed about for a generation, I just don’t think Republican cynicism on abortion will be allowed to prevailAnd the second argument, while defensible in theory, just doesn’t make any sense in the real world. Whatever you think of the constitutional provenance of Roe, the idea that a post-Roe world would somehow entail a sort of national referendum on basic abortion rights, with a dignified debate and simple up-or-down votes in every state, defies everything we know about the politics of abortion and the nature of state legislatures. The reality is that the reversal of Roe would turn state politics across the country into an endless, 24/7 battleground over a vast array of abortion legislation, perhaps indefinitely. At worst, it could produce the kind of reasoned debate associated with the Schiavo case, every single day, across the country. At best, abortion policy would overshadow many compelling issues most of the time, and some compelling issues all of the time.So you don’t have to be an abortion rights ultra to shudder at the prospect of Roe‘s reversal. Yet Alito’s confirmation will likely bring us face-to-face with that contingency.If the genial Jersey judge conducts a pitch-perfect balancing act in the Judiciary hearings, maybe none of this will matter. And even if he doesn’t, Senate Democrats obviously don’t have the votes to block him, and face an agonizing decision about using a filibuster weapon thatwill likely be snatched away from them immediately–and permanently–through the invocation of the Nuclear Option.But no matter what happens next, Alito is probably not going to be confirmed without serious controversy, and is probably going to face a fight. And the fight will likely, and naturally, wind up revolving around the constitutional status of abortion, which much as we might wish otherwise, is truly hanging in the balance, if not right now, then in a future so near that we should all soberly consider its baleful nature–terrible for women, and bad for democracy.

One of those low-grade-fever, under-the-radar discussions that often consume the chattering classes involves the possibility that the Republican Party will offer up John McCain as the successor to George W. Bush in 2008. It’s an especially interesting topic to us political junkies who know (a) how much savage hatred was built up in 2000 between McCain and the movement conservative/K Street/theocon establishment backing Bush; (b) how often McCain has violated conservative litmus tests on domestic issues ranging from tax cuts to global climate change to ethics legislation; and (c) how tempting it is to McCain’s old GOP enemies to bring him back into the establishment to save it from total immolation in 2008.I’ve already weighed in on a TPMCafe discussion of McCain’s future, but was prompted to say more here by an interesting assessment of McCain’s rapproachment with conservatives written by Byron York of National Review, published by The New Republic.York is a very good old-school reporter who knows the conservative world intimately, so I’ll take his word for it that McCain’s efforts on Bush’s behalf in 2004; his base-pleasing outspokenness about the righteousness of the war in Iraq; and the recent conservative convergance with the Arizonan on the fiscal profligacy of the congressional GOP; are all factors that cover a multitude of McCain’s past and present heresies against Republican orthodoxy. But I submit those heresies–which include McCain’s sponsorship, with Joe Lieberman, of the climate change legislation conservatives hate passionately–remain a bar to a McCain run in 2008, unless he goes far out of his way in the future to tack back to the Right. The other factor, of course, is exactly how desperate Republicans are becoming when they think about 2008. Do they embrace their ancient intraparty enemy over their friends? Will they demand McCain bend the knee on a variety of conservative litmus tests? How many assurances will they require about the shape and the staffing of a potential McCain White House? (Will my colleague The Moose, for example, be banned from grazing among the canapes at White House receptions?).My own gut feeling about the current conservative flirtation with McCain is that it’s all a matter of hedging bets. The Right will look high and low for a presidential alternative to McCain, but the big priority is to make sure they get a sufficiently clear set of commitments from him to make the competition as insignificant as possible.For us very interested outsiders in this Republican debate, the major question is how big a piece of his own persona McCain has to repudiate to attract GOP forces who’d rather try to tame and train him, than to actually listen to his words. And for McCain, the question is how far he’s willing to go to make his own proud and independent words meaningless.

Rick Perlstein, author of Before The Storm, the fine 2002 book about the 1964 Goldwater campaign, is getting some blogospheric buzz after posting a speech he did to a conservative confab at Princeton. In his acerbic remarks, which undoubtedly discomfited hosts who expected him to regale the group with AuH2O war stories, he examined the parallels between the Goldwater zealots who got caught up in the manifold ethical and legal problems of the Nixon administration, and those who today are distinguishing themselves likewise in scandals and other violations of conservative principle, such as fiscal profligacy.Rick’s observations about the corruption of conservative ideologues into what they once disparaged as mere “Republicans” are acute and on-target, but I’d add an additional thought about the second-generation conservatives who are now running and ruining our country.I wrote a review for Blueprint magazine earlier this year that compared and contrasted Perlstein’s book with Craig Shirley’s hagiography of Reagan’s failed but seminal 1976 campaign, Reagan’s Revolution. And Shirley’s book made it plain that most of the people who now control Washington made their bones in that and subsequent Reagan campaigns, not in Goldwater’s or Nixon’s efforts.If you compare the Goldwater and Reagan generations of conservatives, the first thing that jumps out at you is that the latter became convinced that conservatism needed for political reasons a much sunnier disposition, and a more popular agenda, than that offered bt the dour but principled Arizonan. The second thing that jumps out at you is that Reagan himself won the GOP nomination and the presidency after embracing a supply-side economic doctrine that made it easy to be conservative, offering tax cuts that paid for themselves without forcing any real decisions about the role of the federal government in national life.This doctrine has largely been discredited economically, but it’s had a sensational and still-vibrant run as the political underpinning of Republican fiscal policies that promise to square every circle, and invite every corruption of traditional conservative principles.The transition from supply-side theory to corrupt practices has been devious if predictable. But the big jump was supplied by Grover Norquist’s “starve the beast” concept (the phrase itself borrowed from Reagan’s budget director, David Stockman, who ultimately deplored the idea), that conservatives should embrace tax cuts without worrying about spending cuts, since the former would eventually force the latter. In my own article about Norquist’s significance, I described “starve the beast” as offering Republicans the political equivalent of a bottomless crack pipe: you could support both tax cuts and spending increases, and use both to buy votes and reward favored constituencies, because it would all come out in the wash someday, when future administrations and Congresses would be forced to balance the books.The ready embrace of “starve the beast” ideology by the Republican Party of the W. era has also exposed another rotten underpinning of conservatism in power: if you don’t believe in the actual ability of the federal government to do anything of real value, then why not turn federal agencies into patronage machines and well-paid holding pens for rising young ideologues?This question, I suspect, explains how you get from Reaganesque critiques of bureaucratic incompetence to Brownie, in less than a generation.In other words, I believe the endemic corruption of conservatives in power we are witnessing today is not just a morality play about power’s corrupting influence, or about the descent of ideologues into the practical swamps of politics. Worse than that, it’s about the consequences of entrusting government’s vast power to people who can’t think of it as a force for the common good, and thus, inevitably, treat it as a force for private gain.

With all the obsession in Washington over (brightening) Democratic prospects for retaking the U.S. Congress, it’s good to see the Washington Post taking notice of the other big battleground for 2006: governorships.In yesterday’s WaPo, Dan Balz and Chris Cillizza note that 22 Republican governorships will be up next year, as compared with 14 Dem seats. They cite New York, California, Ohio, Florida, Nevada, Arkansas and Colorado and Maryland as Republican-held state chief executive postions potentially vulnerable in 2006, with Massachusetts as an add-on if Mitt Romney decides not to go for another term. For some reason, they miss Alabama and Georgia, where Republican incumbents got a temporary boost from their reaction to Hurricane Katrina, but remain vulnerable. ‘Bama’s Bob Riley still has to get past Judge Roy Moore, R-Hysteria, and then will probably face Democratic Lt. Gov. Lucy Baxley, a candidate with almost no negatives. And Georgia’s Sonny Perdue remains a shaky pick against Democrats Cathy Cox and Mark Taylor, both of whom were running ahead of the GOPer in pre-Katrina polls.I’d add to the mix Alaska, where profoundly unpopular incumbent Republican Frank Murkowski’s acting like he will run again, at a minimum creating a messy and negative GOP primary. House Democratic leader Ethan Berkowitz (disclosure: a friend of mine) is already in the field, and could be joined by former Gov. Tony Knowles, but anyway you slice it, this is not a safe seat for GOPers.The WaPo report cites Michigan’s Jennifer Granholm, Wisconsin’s Jim Doyle, and Illnois’ Rod Blagojevich as potentially vulnerable incumbent Dems, with Iowa’s open seat (vacated by Tom Vilsack) as another GOP target. But the Dem incumbents have yet to draw any kind of world-beating rivals, and the Iowa situation remains very fluid.Add it all up, and it looks like the Donkey party is in a great position to regain a majority of governorships (we currently trail 28-22). And that’s great news for a party that came out of the 2004 elections afraid that it was becoming ghettoized into a small number of states.

I rise today to a point of personal privilege: the opportunity to defend my friend and colleague, and fellow blogospheric furry mammal, The Bull Moose (a.k.a., Marshall Wittmann) from a double-barreled attempt over at DailyKos to barbecue his tough old hide.What did the Moose do to earn this extensive abuse? He provided a short quote to the Washington Post commenting on the likely Republican treatment of Nancy Pelosi’s Iraq statement the other day, the point being that the timing of the statement reinforced the White House’s effort to frame the Iraq debate as offering a Manichean choice between victory or immediate withdrawal. The Post reporter, sensing an opportunity to make some trouble, tracked down David Sirota and read him the quote, and Sirota dutifully called Marshall an “insulated elitist” who was stabbing the Democratic Party in the back. (Side-note to David: you might want to discard the stab-in-the-back metaphor, given its unsavory origins in post-World-War-I German politics. Sorry for the “elitist” pedantry, but it’s good advice).In response to this exchange, Markos went on for a number of graphs accusing The Moose of calling Pelosi a coward, of calling Jack Murtha a coward, of supporting Bush on the war, of being a neocon chickenhawk, etc., etc. Armando went further, accusing Wittmann of McCarthyism, and of being a “Rovian pawn,” and concluding with a demand that the DLC fire his ass.Lordy, lordy. So many words of abuse in response to so few words of provocation. Where to begin?When I read the quote, I thought it was pretty clear Marshall was describing the Rovian spin on Pelosi’s statement, not agreeing with it, and I know for a fact that’s what he meant, in a longer conversation with the reporter from which the quote was lifted. But okay, let’s say for the sake of argument that he left the impression he did agree with it. Where did he call Pelosi a “coward?” Where did he call Murtha–whom he has previously defended from Republican attacks–a “coward?”To avoid any misunderstanding on this point, let me be clear: Marshall’s beef with Pelosi isn’t about her position on Iraq, or Murtha’s, or anybody else’s. It’s a free country and a big-tent party. But she’s the party leader in the House, making a statement transparently designed in its timing to become the Democratic response to Bush’s speech. Sure, she claimed she wasn’t speaking for the Caucus, but in the next breath, said a majority of the Caucus agreed with her but wouldn’t come out and say so (which certainly ran a higher risk of being interpreted as an accusation of “cowardice” against Democrats than anything Wittmann’s said, BTW).Now, over at Kos, and all over the blogosphere, people say positive and negative things about the leadership qualities and tactical and strategic decisions of Democrat leaders all the time, and sometimes that causes heartburn, but they’re rarely if ever accused of “McCarthyism.” Marshall’s criticism of Pelosi is something I’ve heard echoed in conversations with many Democrats, some of whom agree with the actual Pelosi-Murtha position. I hardly think it’s the Sin Against the Holy Ghost to tell a reporter what he already knew about this line of internal debate.The next cookie on the plate is the assertion that Wittmann is a stay-the-course shill for Bush’s war policies. Gee, let’s see: just yesterday, The Moose said nobody should believe Bush is really changing his strategy on Iraq until he gets rid of Donald Rumsfeld. I somehow don’t think that was in the daily Pentagon talking points on Iraq. And in fact, Wittmann has been regularly critical, often angrily so, about Bush’s handling of Iraq and national security generally. Yes, he’s more hawkish than many Democrats (after all, he’s an independent), and he’s more hawkish than I am, but he’s no shill for Bush on any subject.And that brings me to the real howler in the attempted Moosicide, the “Rovian pawn” bit.I don’t expect Armando to know that much about Marshall Wittmann’s history, but I certainly do. He was a conservative intellectual and activist in the 90s who got to see people like Rove, DeLay, Reed, Abramoff, Norquist, Gingrich, Bush I and Bush II, up real close, and got very sick of what his party was becoming, and started saying so publicly. He was a key figure in John McCain’s 2000 effort to take the GOP away from the K Street/theocon crowd, and became if not Public Enemy Number One, then certainly on everybody’s enemies list. He was shown the door at two conservative think tanks for his heresies, and finally, when his hero McCain decided to make at least partial peace with the Power Crowd, he walked.I don’t see anybody holding David Brock’s past associations against him, but The Moose, probably because he hasn’t totally jumped over to Our Team, doesn’t seem to benefit from any Prodigal Son generosity, at least outside the DLC. And anybody who reads his blog regularly knows that nobody, not Markos, not Armando, not me, not you, does a more savage and effective job of exposing the rottenness of the whole GOP machine in lurid and extremely well-informed detail.And that’s why the DLC employs him; why we don’t demand that he tow anybody’s party line; and why he’s a valuable ally to Democrats, even if you disagree with him, which I do pretty often. We need to listen and even sponsor independent voices; maybe we’ll learn something from them, if only how to appeal to the millions of voters who have left Their Team but haven’t joined ours.On a more personal note, it pains me to see Wittmann demonized by anybody, especially as some sort of hatchet man, because he’s actually one of the nicest and certainly funniest people I’ve ever met. He and I have a water-fountain routine where we lapse into Marxist factional jargon in describing the day’s political events (“Lieberman has clearly exposed himself as a Social Fascist Right Opportunist;” “Our red state strategy must separate the small peasants from the kulaks.”) And far from Sirota’s description of him as a Washington Elitist, Wittmann’s greatest thrill in politics was his recent opportunity to hang out with Kinky Friedman (and his sidekick, “Jewford,” one of the original Texas Jewboys) in Dallas. I hope when he’s grazing in retirement, he can publish the full account of this encounter in its screamingly hilarious detail.So please, Moose-o-phobics, lighten up and recognize a rare talent whose regular refusal to serve up turgid partisan fare, and occasional outrages, are more than offset by his knowledgeable skewering of the right-wing machine, and his independent willingness to tell us things we don’t like but probably ought to consider.

One of the saddest aspects of modern life is that modern advance-society people and their news media tend to get bored with ongoing challenges that lose novelty.That’s definitely the case with the global AIDS crisis.Yes, the AIDS crisis in America has abated somewhat, but it’s still with us.Yes, the AIDS crisis in Asia has yet to gain headlines, but it will.And yes, the AIDS crisis in Africa is old news by now, but it continues to represent the most massive humanitarian disaster in a continent already beset by disasters beyond measure.Many of us outside Africa have learned to beat our breasts about our failure to stop the genocide in Rwanda, and a few of us are agitated about the ongoing quasi-genocide in Darfur, and that’s all good. But the death toll, actual and potential, from AIDS in Africa makes every man-made contribution to the Grim Reaper’s work pale by comparison.There are things we can do to succor the dying and suffering, to limit future deaths, and to take care of the vast number of orphans AIDS is producing. And taking those steps, particularly in terms of medical and pharmaceutical supplies, should be divorced from the broader argument over conditional or unconditional assistance to African regimes.It’s sad that “awareness” remains the primary goal of AIDS advocates on this World AIDS Day. But that’s where we are, and any American who professes fidelity to a compassionate view of human morality, based on religion or any other system, should manifest this awareness in a serious effort to demand action and save lives.

There’s lots of things going on this week in the tangled politics and policy of U.S. policy towards Iraq. I’ve already commented on Bush’s latest big speech on the subject; indeed, I may have been uncharacteristically too generous towards the slippery Chief Executive, based on subsequent analysis of the Great Big Policy Document he released along with his speech.The DLC issued its own assessment today, not only challenging Bush’s continued happy-talk on Iraq (and its unwillingness to show a change of strategy by, say, firing Donald Rumsfeld), but also disagreeing with House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi’s ill-timed endorsement of an immediate withdrawal from Iraq, combined with an unhelpful I’m-not-speaking-for-the-House-Caucus-but-they-secretly-agree-with-me statement. Beyond these large points, there was another negative assessment of Bush’s speech from an unusual quarter with an unusual message: Lawrence Kaplan of The New Republic. A writer often described as a Democratic neocon, and an unambiguous supporter of the Iraq war effort, Kaplan takes on Bush’s claim that the military is now adopting state-of-the-art counterinsurgency methods learned in Vietnam, and pretty much hits it like a pinata from several different directions. It’s definitely worth reading. Matt Yglesias’ comment on Kaplan’s piece is quite good as well.And speaking of Iraq and Vietnam, I had one of those old-guy moments today when I suddenly remembered a moment in the debate on Vietnam which reminds me of the odd disjunction between the relatively small policy differences dividing most Democrats and many Republicans on Iraq, and the big tonal and intepretative differences they sometimes convey.In the famously fractious 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, the big platform debate over Vietnam (note to young people: this was back when big platform debates were still possible) involved a majority plank which endorsed free elections in South Vietnam to create a coalition government including the National Liberation Front (the political arm of the Viet Cong), and a minority plank endorsing a coalition government including the NLF that would be required to sponsor free elections. The policy distinctions between these two planks were about as meaningful as today’s difference between supporters of a benchmarked withdrawal from Iraq based on estimated dates, and a timetable withdrawal contingent on benchmarks. Yet at the time, these two proposals were almost universally described by the news media as “pro-war” and “anti-war” platform planks. The lesson is this: So much as many of us might wish to focus on the policy details of proposals about what to do now in Iraq, you can’t take the politics out of politics, and the “tonal” or “contextual” implications of various proposals, despite their substantive similarity, matter a great deal.

As your probably know, George W. Bush did another “big speech” on Iraq at the Naval Academy today, accompanied by the release of a big, fat document outlining a “victory strategy.” Going into the speech, there were two distinct schools of thought in the Washington buzz about what Bush would likely do: (1) just another repackaging of the “trust us, we’re winning” message, along with attacks on Bush’s critics, and an effort to ascribe “cut and run” as the official Democratic stance; or (2) a full-fledged flip-flop, along the lines of the famous 2002 Homeland Security maneuver, towards the prevailing Democratic (and increasingly, Senate Republican) “benchmarked withdrawal” position, along with attacks on Bush’s critics, and an effort to ascribe “cut and run” as the official Democratic stance. Having quickly read the speech, and the “strategy document,” my gut reaction is that Bush wound up coming in between these two poles, with the speech tending towards (1) and the actual policy details towards (2). What’s increasingly clear is that the administration is going to begin withdrawing troops, probably beginning with a “downsurge” of the “upsurged” pre-Iraqi-election deployment, by the beginning of the year. Larger withdrawals will happen at some propitious moment next year, unless all hell breaks loose, more because of internal military manpower limitations than because of any real strategy. The Pentagon has already begun shifting towards a less visible role for U.S. troops in going after the insurgents, as administration critics have been demanding for some time now. And at every step of the way, the Bushies will relentlessly claim this is how it was all planned to work out from the beginning, and that Bush’s Democratic critics are the primary obstacle to the task of achieving benchmarks for success and troop withdrawals. This whole emerging scenario creates a complicated set of challenges for Democrats. Some responses are pretty easy: Bush’s speech didn’t really reflect the change of course indicated in the “strategy document,” and to the extent that the American and Iraqi people aren’t likely to download the 35-page tome, he didn’t send the requisite signals of an adjustment to reality. And how can anybody trust him to get this right when he can’t admit specific mistakes, and won’t fire the people–most especially Rumsfeld–responsible for making the post-invasion situation so horrible? But beyond that, there is arguably an administration shift in strategy underway, albeit awkward, defensive, and mendacious, and Democrats have to decide pretty quickly if they want to deny the change, take credit for it, or shift their own position to demand a quicker withdrawal to maintain “partisan differentiation.”Regular readers of this blog probably know I don’t like the last response; you should never, on both moral and political grounds, let the opposition dictate your own position, and in any event, anyone at this stage of American political history who doesn’t think Ds and Rs have different policy agendas is clearly not a likely voter. Questioning, if not denying, the change is clearly appropriate. Demanding further documentation of the apparent shift in administration strategy towards Iraq, given all the past lies and mistakes, is undoubtedly the right thing to do. And demanding the head of Don Rumsfeld might not be a bad idea either. But we do need to be open to the option of loudly claiming that Democrats, not to mention the American people, have forced the administration to adjust their strategy, and must continue to keep the pressure on until the facts on the ground in Iraq really change. Bush and the GOP won’t acknowledge it; the MSM may not even “get it”; so it’s up to us to make some noise and keep up the heat, but without some short-sighted panicky rush to find a position diametrically opposed to Bush’s, whether or not it’s the right thing to do from a national interest or even political point of view. We don’t have a lot of time to figure this out, so let’s get on with it.

The quasi-genocidal crisis in Darfur is finally getting a bit of renewed attention from the rest of the world, but it’s not clear it’s happening fast enough to make a difference.In case you’ve forgotten Darfur because it hasn’t been in the headlines much, more than 300,000 people have probably died there since the government of Sudan unleashed a vicious counter-insurgency campaign in 2003 designed to squash an insurgency loosely linked to the Southern Sudan forces Khartoum was trying to outmaneuver in negotiations to end the long-running North-South civil war. Just as importantly, more than two million Darfurians have been displaced by the fighting, and are hemmed into refugee camps with no means of subsistence other than food shipments from international organizations.And while the direct violence against Darfurians by the Khartoum-paid-and-trained Janjaweed militias has abated somewhat, the strategy of keeping them penned up under atrocious conditions is doing the Grim Reaper’s work as efficiently as the previous kill-and-rape raids on hundreds of villages.That’s why, as Eric Reeves explained on The New Republic’s site yesterday, the most immediate threat to Darfur stems from Janjaweed attacks on the international humanitarian aid organizations that are literally serving as Darfur’s lifeline. Some are already withdrawing personnel from Darfur, and others may soon follow, given the general recognition that African Union peacekeeping forces are incapable of providing security in the region, and no one else is on the scene.But as always in Darfur, there’s a lot of political fog distorting a clear picture of the situation.There are ongoing if sluggish negotiations underway between Khartoum and the two insurgent groups it is supposedly fighting in Darfur: the Fur-tribal-based Sudanese Liberation Army (SLA), and the Islamist Justice and Equality Movement (JEM). Unfortunately, as the Kofi Annan statement I just linked to shows, these negotiations are helping feed the idea that this is a civil war or “ethnic conflict” where both sides are equally to blame for the death and destruction, and where the rest of the world can legitimately step aside as the parties to the dispute wrangle through a settlement.The only bright note recently was the voice-vote passage by the U.S. Senate of the Darfur Peace and Accountability Act, which would recommit our government to an end to the disaster in Darfur; pledge immediate military support to an expansion of the AU deployment; and place sanctions on the government of Sudan, including seizure of oil shipments and withdrawal of travel rights for Khartoum officials, until such time as it releashes the Janjaweed and starts cooperating with humanitarian agencies.The bill still needs to get scheduled in the House, which in an obscure committee action stripped out previously approved funds to support an expanded AU peacekeeping mission. And that’s a good example of what’s wrong in this whole debate. Nobody will come out and say they don’t want to take action in Darfur, but the Bush administration officials who are so appreciative of Khartoum’s assistance in the War on Terror are obviously helping slow down any binding congressional action that would complicate things for them. Today New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof helped shine a spotlight on this subterranean but effective strategy.The whole situation reminds me of a conversation I had many years ago with a veteran Georgia State Patrol trooper who used to work traffic accidents in a rural community. The ambulance service there was provided by a local undertaker, who got paid a small fee for hauling accident victims to the hospital, but who got the burying rights if the victims died. So, said my informant, the ambulance driver would pick up the grievously injured passengers and then head off towards the hospital, lights flashing and sirens screaming, at about 15 miles per hour.That’s what the U.S. and international mission to “save” Darfur looks like to me right now.

I didn’t plan on blogging about football after the Thanksgiving holiday, despite my joy at Georgia’s victory over Georgia Tech on Saturday. But tonight I ran across a Lang Whitaker post on the Sports Illustrated site that perfectly reflects the intimate love-hate relationship that enlivens “rivalry” games like Tech/Georgia, while celebrating the whole spectacle of deep-fried football. Check it out.