I’m struck by the following.

Election Day 2008 is in about 18 months. In other words, Election Day 2008 is two pregnancies from now.

If a woman gets pregnant tomorrow, she’ll give birth around Super Duper Tuesday, February 5, 2008, when more states than ever before will hold their primaries and, very likely, effectively determine the nominees.

If a woman gets pregnant on Super Duper Tuesday, she’ll give birth around Election Day, November 4, 2008.

We have to wait through two whole pregnancies, beginning to end, to find out who the next president is.

It’s gonna be a looooooooong season.

Glenn Greenwald, on the idea that war criticism will “embolden the enemy”:

Mature societies do not make decisions by wondering what the Bad People want and then automatically doing the opposite. That is the mindset of a child.

This is what I’ve been thinking for some time but hadn’t thought to put into such simple, direct words. Bravo.

I’ve heard Dick Cheney or others say things like, “Osama bin Laden is probably smiling at the idea of all these war protesters.”

So what if he is? Who the hell cares what he thinks? Why are you imprisoned by the thoughts and feelings of a crazy human being? Why give him that legitimacy?

The mindset of a child.

Thomas Jefferson complains about Queen Elizabeth’s visit to Virginia.

Yet much of the Publick Attention has been turned of late to issues of a Lotterie merely to see Her Majesty for a few moments or of a “Webcaste” for those who do not win such a Lotterie. Moreover, Publick Discourse itself has been spent on the issue of whether it is required of gentle ladies, or merely proper of them, to wear hats within the presence of Her Majesty…

From a few months ago: Tired Sci-Fi Tropes, Part 1 and Part 2.

My favorites:

(1) Humanoid aliens. This is the one I always make snarky comments about whenever Matt’s watching reruns of Star Trek: Voyager.

I don’t have the space here to go into the reasons why an alien life form, even an intelligent one, is unlikely to be an upright bipedal, bilaterally symmetrical, four-limbed, endoskeletal, pentadactyl, binocular and binaural chordate.

(2) The Planet-as-Location.

Sci-fi writers love to treat “planet” as if it’s a single location. “Let’s land on the planet, where we’ll meet the one settlement of the one culture, and have the one adventure the planet can afford us.” Planets are entire WORLDS. Even with advanced technology, it will take a space exploration crew YEARS to explore and survey a single planet. Even an uninhabited one.

Wow! I’d been looking for this old “3-2-1 Contact” segment forever:

[via Scrubbles]

Bill Clinton, a big crossword fan, wrote the clues for a special New York Times crossword this weekend. It appears only online. (This weekend’s Sunday Magazine is themed around Baby Boomers.) Solve it in Java, or print it out as a PDF. I won’t be doing it until tomorrow, myself.

When is Manhattan the most crowded?

Between 5 and 6 p.m. on the Wednesday after Christmas, apparently:

“You have, on the one hand, all the tourists who are here… Then you have people who have left the matinee and people who are coming to evening shows and eating dinner before or after the shows.” Add the commuters who are still pouring out of offices, along with people returning gifts or using their gift cards.

Agoraphobes: stay away.

Can I just say something, related to my job as an editor?

I hate the word utilize.

Ninety-nine percent of the time, you should use use.

Utilize makes me cringe.

Thank you.

I’ve been reading a new book about Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger; it’s called (appropriately enough) Nixon and Kissinger: Partners in Power by Robert Dallek.

There seem to be a bunch of new Nixon books out lately. In addition to Nixon and Kissinger, there’s Nixon and Mao: The Week That Changed the World, by Margaret MacMillan, and Very Strange Bedfellows: The Short and Unhappy Marriage of Richard Nixon & Spiro Agnew, by Jules Witcover. And in a week and a half, a brand new full-length Nixon biography comes out, puzzlingly titled The Invincible Quest: The Life of Richard Milhous Nixon (how can a quest be invincible?) by Conrad Black, the financier and former newspaper magnate who is currently on trial for criminal fraud. I’m really looking forward to that last one, because Black, despite the criminal charges, is apparently a terrific author – his biography of FDR is highly praised. But his Nixon bio isn’t being published in the U.S. until the fall. I might have to order it from Canada.

I have a fascination with Richard Nixon and I’m not totally sure why. Part of it is Watergate – it just seems like a great story, filled with suspense, as things get worse and worse for Nixon, finally snowballing and ending in his resignation under threat of impeachment. There’s also the dramatic arc of his life story – rise (Congress, Senate and the vice presidency), fall (two electoral defeats in a row – for president in 1960, and for California governor in 1962), rise (twice elected president), fall (Watergate), and then his attempted vindication as an elder statesman until his death.

And Nixon himself is such an engrossing, flawed character – the paranoia; the paradox of a man raised as a Quaker who, in private, curses like a sailor and gets sloshed, and who rose to the presidency even though he was temperamentally unsuited to being a politician – shy and awkward in public.

I don’t know exactly what it is about him. But he fascinates me.

Matt and I are going to London in June! We’ll be there for six days.

This is a really big deal for us for a few reasons.

I’ve been to London twice before, but it’s been more than 13 years since I last visited. I haven’t been overseas since.

As for Matt, he’s never been to Europe. Except for two trips to Montreal in the past couple of years, he’s never even been out of the United States. A big, big part of the excitement for me will be accompanying Matt on his first trip overseas.

Matt left all the planning to me because I have more travel experience. I was worried, but I am so proud of myself for planning this trip. I know, it really doesn’t take much skill to click on a mouse and type on a keyboard. But I had to get over some psychological barriers – committing to spending the money and choosing where to go.

I’ve written about my travel hang-ups before. Traveling is expensive (and Europe is particularly expensive for Americans these days), and a trip is only for a finite amount of time. But I love London. There are other places in Europe I’d like to see – places I’ve never been to before – but for some reason I feel a need to go back to London first. And I feel like London would be a great first overseas trip for Matt, especially since he’s an Anglophile. I think once we do this trip, we’ll be ready to visit other places.

So we’ll spend almost a week in London. We’ll probably take one or two day trips while we’re there, maybe to Stonehenge and/or someplace else. I’m so excited.

I’m also feeling anxious. I felt anxious as soon as I clicked on the final button and committed us to the trip. What if it’s not money well spent? What if we don’t have enough time? What if the hotel sucks? Should I have booked a trip somewhere else instead, somewhere completely new to both of us? But according to various online reviews, the hotel should be fine, and we’ll have plenty of time to do plenty of things, and I have money for a trip, and there are plenty of things I haven’t seen in London, I mean it’s LONDON, after all, and we can take a trip somewhere else next time.

Part of my anxiety, to be totally pessimistic and bizarre, arises from knowing that I’ll feel sad once we return. Rather than going on a great trip and feeling a big letdown upon returning home and having to go back to work, part of me wants to avoid that emotional rollercoaster in the first place. Why go away when, in the end, you’ll just have to come back? Better not to go at all than experience the sadness of a trip ending.

Weird, no? I think that’s really the key to my travel anxiety. But I’ve nipped it, and we’ve planned a trip, and it will be great.

I can’t wait.

Each of the major network nightly news broadcasts – on ABC, CBS and NBC – airs at 6:30 pm. But some might recall a time when they all aired at 7:00 pm. I think there’s something more glamorous, or at least more prime-time-ish, about airing the news at 7:00 instead of at 6:30. Not necessarily better, just different.

I dug into the New York Times archives to find the date that each of the three networks moved its broadcast from 7:00 to 6:30:

ABC – December 15, 1986
CBS – September 5, 1988
NBC – September 9, 1991

In ABC’s case, the above date is just when the flagship station, WABC in New York, moved its broadcast to 6:30 – it wasn’t a network decision. But as a major affiliate, it probably had a big influence. And because the news was already taped at 6:30 for a 7:00 airing, that meant that the ABC station in New York began airing it live.

Two things I hadn’t realized in learning this information. One, I hadn’t realized the schedule shifts had occurred so long ago. I’d thought they had all happened in the early-to-mid 90s. Two, I hadn’t realized that the shifts occurred so far apart. So there was actually a long time when you could, for instance, watch Peter Jennings and then shift over to Dan Rather or Tom Brokaw. Weird.

“One of my strongest guiding beliefs in life is the moral duty of empiricism, of actively checking, of actively trying to discover where you’re wrong. And then correcting your beliefs and not letting your preconceptions interfere with that to an undue extent. I think history and journalism both try to teach that.”

– from an interview with Jonathan Rauch.

Also from that interview:

“I think Maureen Dowd is very good at what she does. But the problem is that lots of people who aren’t any good at it think this is journalism.”

“Don’t go to law school unless you want to be a lawyer.”

Matt and I were talking last night about our capacity to judge whether George W. Bush is the worst president in American history.

Is our judgment clouded because we’re currently living through his presidency? After all, we feel most strongly about things when we’re living through them.

Is our judgment clouded by our revulsion for the man? Concluding that Bush is the worst president in American history would certainly justify my revulsion. Knowing that he’s the worst president ever would give me some satisfaction. I want him to be the worst president ever. For that reason, I’m wary of my judgment. Is my revulsion greater than what Nixon-haters felt during Watergate, or what people felt during Carter’s hostage crisis, or what many gays felt toward Reagan during the AIDS nightmare of the 1980s, or what I, an 18-year-old political newbie, felt toward George H.W. Bush in 1992? The heat of the moment can distort one’s views.

According to Wikipedia, Harding and Buchanan are usually judged the worst presidents. Harding is best known for his corrupt administration, Buchanan for his incompetence. But Harding’s presidency didn’t have any lasting negative effects on the country, and Buchanan, while he didn’t lift a finger to stop the impending civil war, didn’t really make things worse than they already were. Bush, however, will leave the nation worse than he found it through active mismanagement. He has failed spectacularly.

A piece by Sean Wilentz last year, “The Worst President in History?”, claiming that Bush is in fact the worst ever, makes a pretty strong case.

Meanwhile, veteran journalist Jules Witcover has a piece behind the New York Times firewall today: Who’s Worse, Nixon or Bush? Unfortunately, this piece is only available to TimesSelect readers, but here are some excerpts:

Having been in Washington for only 53 years, I cannot from personal exposure espouse the view that the current president is the worst in American history. I have observed only 10 of them since reaching the age of reason, so I can judge only that he is the worst in my adult lifetime.

From World War II to date, there is in my mind and experience only one serious and obvious competitor: Richard Nixon. I say that not simply because he was the first president to resign from office in scandal and disgrace. Well before the Watergate affair that eventually was his undoing, he had compiled a long record of deception, deceit and duplicity. […]

Nixon’s sins basically grew from an unquenchable lust for power. He was determined to hold on to what he had and to get more and more of it, contrived through secrecy and an anything-goes political ethic that in time poisoned much of his five-and-a-half-year presidency.

In the end, the damage done to the nation was arrested by a change in the Oval Office… the Watergate nightmare essentially shook America domestically without more than temporarily impairing her relations with the world. […]

George W. Bush, on the other hand, who ran in 2000 as a unthreatening “compassionate conservative,” soon encountered a crisis and a fateful opportunity that put him on a different mission. He seized on the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, to segue from domestic affairs and a legitimate self-defense invasion of Afghanistan to a radical foreign policy of supposedly preventive war in Iraq. […]

In a bold display of opportunism, Bush anointed himself as a “war president” who capitalized on a combination of American patriotism and fear to set the nation on its current course. As Zbigniew Brzezinski, the national security adviser in the Carter administration, has written, Bush’s use of the phrase “war on terror” was “a classic self-inflicted wound” that intentionally created “a culture of fear in America,” enabling him to mobilize the public behind his military actions. […]

While Bush continues to have the power of the veto with which to combat the Democratic challenge, he is staggering toward the finish line of his presidency. Whatever happens in Iraq, there seems little chance that history will accord him any positive legacy for his eight years of over-reaching in foreign policy and abuse of civil liberties at home.

Nixon’s fall from grace in 1974 cast a heavy shadow over some historic achievements, most notably his opening to China. But his sins, deplorable as they were, mostly concerned domestic matters. They did not leave his party in the hole that Bush’s radical adventurism abroad has dug for the Republicans, and for the country he has so catastrophically led, without any compensating accomplishments akin to Nixon’s, domestic or foreign.

For Bush to be the worst president in American history doesn’t mean that he has to be the worst president imaginable. (Hitler, Kim Jong Il or Pol Pot are some who would be worse.) He merely has to be worse than any of the other 41 men who have held the office. Someone’s got to be the worst. Why must it be the effect of a present-day bias to think Bush is the one?

Can anyone recommend a good dentist in Manhattan? I need to make an appointment next month for my regular biannual checkup, and now that I have different health insurance I’ve given up my old dentist. If you have a recommendation, please e-mail me. Thanks!

Yesterday was Jerry Falwell’s funeral. But, um:

The funeral also drew protesters from the Westboro Baptist Church of Topeka, Kan., which sent about a dozen members who claimed Mr. Falwell was a friend of gay men and lesbians, The Associated Press reported.

And I didn’t think it was possible for the Westboro folks to get any stupider.

They’re not even trying anymore.

Matt and I TiVo “The View” every day, so we saw yesterday’s big shouting match between Rosie O’Donnell and Elisabeth Hasselbeck. (Scroll down here for a transcript.) What started as a discussion about the war turned into an unusually angry argument between Rosie and Elisabeth about whether Elisabeth has sufficiently defended Rosie in the face of Fox News commentators, who have claimed that Rosie has implied that American troops are terrorists. Matt cringed and covered his eyes and made noises and finally had to walk away from the TV. (He hates watching people argue.) Me, I was riveted. Rosie and Elisabeth shouted at each other while poor Joy Behar and guest host Sherri Shepherd were caught in the middle. Joy’s desperate plea to go to a commercial (“Is there no commercial on this show?”) was priceless.

I was riveted, but the whole thing annoyed the crap out of me. I only started watching “The View” last fall, and I’ve been impressed at the substantive political discussions the hosts often have. This could have been another one of those enlightening discussions for the audience, a great opportunity to point out the provincialism of Elisabeth and other war supporters, but no, Rosie had to make it all about her and her relationship with her co-host and she solved nothing.

Elisabeth Hasselbeck seems charming, but I’ve been annoyed by her rah-rah support for Bush and this stupid war. From what I can tell, only one thing motivates her: fear. She’s a young mom with a little girl and another baby on the way, and all that matters to her is that we might be attacked again. She’s totally been sucked in by the Bush Administration’s fearmongering. Forget “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself” – according to Bush, of course, we should be scared. Fear, 9/11, 9/11, 9/11.

Hasselbeck and others actually believe that George W. Bush is the only person who can “protect” us from “the terrorists.” But fighting terrorism is like fighting crime. Any president can do it. After all, it’s not the President who fights terrorism at all. It’s the people who work in government agencies who do it – on the federal, state, and local levels. All the president has to do is turn the government’s resources in the right direction, and we don’t need Bush or even a Republican in the White House for that to happen. “Protecting us” is just a massive law enforcement matter.

Terrorists are not boogeymen. They’re people, and they have motivations. Calling them “the enemy” – god, I think I hate that term more than almost any other – lets you off the hook from having to understand what motivates them. It lets you off the hook from having to think of them as individuals, from having to think about why terrorism happens. Calling them “the enemy” glorifies them, makes all this seem macho and fun, like we’re in “Star Wars” or “The Lord of the Rings.”

Living in a black/white, good/evil paradigm keeps you from having to actually think.

Boo on Elisabeth Hasselbeck for being such a sucker.

And boo on Rosie for making it personal instead of furthering the discussion.

This is why I love the internet. Unmediated contact. Of course, few other celebrities would go sans makeup in a do-rag and drink a beer on camera.

I just found three legitimate blog comments in my comment spam folder. I’ve un-spammed them. I don’t know why they got marked as spam, but my apologies to the commenters!

As of today, there are 600 days left in the Bush presidency.

*waits*