"Legend has it that in 802 CE, Jayavarman II, king of the Khmers, first came to the Kuhlen hills, the future site of Angkor Wat."

"Later, under Jayavarman VII (1181–ca. 1218), Khmer reached its zenith of political power and cultural creativity. Jayavarman VII gained power and territory in a series of successful wars. Khmer conquests were almost unstoppable as they raided home cities of powerful seafaring Chams.... Following Jayavarman VII's death, Khmer experienced a gradual decline.... The Angkorian monarchy survived until 1431...."

In Cambodia, today's "History of" country.

"I let my mind wander, watching my cigarette's ember eat to my fingertips."

That Isthmus article we were talking about when it came out on paper last week is now on line.

I thought you should know. In case you needed to brood. About Wisconsin.

And everything.

"Cambodians... refused to believe anything bad about the United States."

Writes Terry McCoy, in the new issue of Isthmus...

I vividly recall failing to explain to a young boy that some things aren't wonderful in America. People even suffer from depression.

"No, America is beautiful," he replied.

McCoy was in the Peace Corps, where, he complains, he felt "a deep sense of isolation" and "failed time and again to integrate into a culture different from my own." Eventually, he realized he would always be "an outsider," because "I wasn't Khmer and never would be."

Isthmus exploits this alienated young man's musings for a cover story titled "Not my Madison/Political unrest has changed the city's character." You see, when the alienated young man returned from the place where he felt alienated, he found that he was still alienated, because his city had changed. It used to be so harmonious, but somehow these people who were not the Madisonians he grew up with had taken over political power.

Well, Mr. McCoy, I hate to bring you down, but the city of Madison is the capital of an entire state, and, sometimes, an election gives the majority and the governorship to — gasp! — that other party, the one the people of Madison would like to discipline its citizens never to mention any positive feeling for. That discipline was the harmony of Madison that you remember, pre-Cambodia. When the Republicans from the hinterlands came to town and began to enact their policies, Madisonians had a collective nervous breakdown in public.

Post-protests, McCoy is bummed out to find Madisonians in a bad mood. They failed, despite strenuous efforts, to deny Republicans the power that had been legitimately and democratically won in a thoroughly fair election.  America is beautiful, as the Cambodian boy said. But you like to think of him as a fool.

I would love to link to this article, but — alas! — I cannot, not until — what is it? a week? — Isthmus deems it time to put the text on line. Ironically, despite all the left-wing politics and heavy-handed attacks on corporate greed and pressure on us to subordinate our needs to environmentalism, Isthmus wants the people of Madison to pick up the newsprint paper. There are stacks and stacks of this rag all over town. I can't think of any reason for this other than... corporate greed: they want to maximize ad revenue.

So, I'd love to give my readers more of the context of this article, but you can't read the whole thing unless you can get your hands on the inky, pulpy object that I have right here. There's a limit to how many quotes I'm willing to type out to be fair to this young man, who comes across as a brooding introvert. I wonder what the first draft of this article was. I can't help speculating that he had his introspective Cambodian journals, and then he got the idea — or somebody insisted — that he shoehorn all this Wisconsin protest material into it — quotes from UW sociology professors and whatnot.

"When people have been decisively crushed, they get demoralized." — UW Prof. Pam Oliver

That's one of the pull quotes. The other pull quote is:

There's a new sense that normal citizens can't change anything.

Normal citizens! Because — in the Madison hive mind — the people who vote for Republicans are not normal.

UPDATE: The text is up.

"The beginning of Case 002 will be a cathartic moment for all Cambodians."

"While the crimes of the Khmer Rouge were committed over a quarter of a century ago, they remain ingrained in Cambodia’s collective psyche."

Pictures from the Khmer Dynasty room.

Photos taken yesterday at The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Dith Pran "saw his country descend into a living hell" and "survived through nimbleness, guile and sheer desperation."

Dith Pran has died.

See the slideshow, which includes many of his photographs.

Lost at age 8, found -- after living in the wild -- 18 years later.

Her father recognized her from a scar on her arm:

The reconciliation was a joyous one for the father, but apparently not for the daughter, who refuses to wear clothes or eat with chopsticks, fights off anyone who approaches, will not wash and has tried to escape back to the jungle.

Because she can apparently speak no language, it is impossible for her to explain who she is or how she has been living.

“It is not easy, but life is waiting ahead for her,” said Mr Ksor, a policeman who belongs to the Jrai ethnic minority group [in Cambodia]. He is optimistic about the future, and yesterday, six days after her discovery, the woman’s behaviour was said to be improving a little. “When she is hungry, she pats her stomach as a signal,” Mr Ksor said. “If she is not sleeping, she just sits and glances left and right, left and right.”

"A calculated gamble that no matter how much hue and cry his new strategy may provoke, in the end the American people will give him more time..."

I doubt that President Bush has any capacity to inspire Americans about the war in Iraq. I vaguely wish that he could. He's made his decision, and I think people need to support what he's doing and not undercut him by revealing to our enemies that we can be worn down and demoralized. Yet it doesn't bother me that much that Americans are not fired up by presidential speeches. We don't like war, and we especially don't like to live with a long war that doesn't reward us with distinct successes from time to time. We express our dissatisfaction, but I think most of us realize it's the President's responsibility to get us through this. Electing Democrats to Congress can be read as an expression of dissatisfaction, but does it also mean that we expect or even want Congress to interfere with the President's plan?

Here's Sheryl Gay Stolberg's analysis:

By stepping up the American military presence in Iraq, President Bush is not only inviting an epic clash with the Democrats who run Capitol Hill. He is ignoring the results of the November elections, rejecting the central thrust of the bipartisan Iraq Study Group and flouting the advice of some of his own generals, as well as Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki of Iraq.

In so doing, Mr. Bush is taking a calculated gamble that no matter how much hue and cry his new strategy may provoke, in the end the American people will give him more time to turn around the war in Iraq and Congress will not have the political nerve to thwart him by cutting off money for the war....

Wartime clashes between presidents and the Congress are a familiar thread in American history. But perhaps no president since Richard M. Nixon has so boldly expanded an unpopular war. Explaining his decision to invade Cambodia in April 1970, Nixon said: “A majority of the American people, a majority of you listening to me, are for the withdrawal of our forces from Vietnam. The action I have taken tonight is indispensable for the continuing success of that withdrawal program.”

I remember watching that Nixon speech on a little black-and-white TV -- one of the few TVs in East Quad -- when I was a freshman in college at the University of Michigan. We hooted with derision and hatred. How could that evil man think we would believe his insane reassurance about a despicable plan, and how could he dare to portray a new invasion as a response to our demand that he end the war?

More Stolberg:

[N]o American president has been able to prosecute a war indefinitely without the support of the American public. With polls showing fewer than 20 percent of Americans supporting increasing troop levels in Iraq, Mr. Bush and those Republicans who support him know that the new policy will be a tough sell.

“The American people have no reason in the world to think it’s going to work just like the president paints it,” said one of those backers, Senator Pete V. Domenici of New Mexico, “but I think the American people, in their usual good sense, are going to wait around for a while and say, ‘Mr. President, you’ve taken us down a lot of roads in Iraq, let’s go down this one and see if it works.’ ”

I think she's quoting Domenici because he sounds so dumb. Sure, trial and error, people are fine with that system. But what he's saying inelegantly is probably true. People, unhappy though they are, will steel themselves and hope the President has come up with a decently workable plan this time. If you're not one of those people and you're flipping out because you can't understand why Americans -- despite the poll numbers -- seem to accept the President's decisions nonetheless, you probably will only hoot with derision if I say I understand how you feel.

"Our long national nightmare is over."

I woke up to the long-familiar words in the familar voice of our long-lived former President, Gerald Ford. NPR was reporting what I already knew -- someone knocked on my door to tell me in the middle of the night -- Ford had died. He was 93.

I liked him. I voted for him, even though I'd voted for George McGovern four years earlier. He had the distinction of being President without ever having been elected President or Vice President, which was one of the things I liked about him. Lacking a national vote had to mean he didn't deserve to be President, especially since the constitutional process by which he became President involved appointment by a man -- Richard Nixon -- who was disgraced into resignation (soon after the Vice President slot opened because Spiro Agnew was disgraced into resignation). What I liked was the fact that he hadn't presumed to seek the presidency. I have always instinctively resented anyone who thinks he should be President, and that has the overwhelming tendency to include everyone who ever runs.

I was all set to vote for Jimmy Carter in 1976. I'd voted for Carter in the New York primary when he was still a face in a crowd of candidates. But the day before the election, I saw a TV interview in which a reporter asked Carter what he would do if he didn't win. He said he'd go back to his peanut farm. This answer -- does it seem innocuous to you? -- gnawed at me overnight, and, as I was walking to my polling place, I sat down to talk about it with someone who was also planning to vote for Carter, and the two of us changed our vote to Ford. It wasn't so much Ford. It was Carter. I'd decided he was a small man. He didn't fit the Presidency. Did Ford? But Ford was already President. In truth, no one deserves to be President. But Ford did not select himself as President. He had only selected himself to represent one legislative district. I found that appealing.

When Ford became President, I was living in New York City. I wanted to be an artist -- I was presumptuous enough to select myself for that -- but I was working at a day job in a market research firm, doing a job that consisted of reading and classifying the articles in magazines. I remember the cover of Newsweek -- or was it Time? -- when Ford came in. It was a cartoon of Ford in the Oval Office with housecleaning implements -- maybe a feather duster and a vacuum cleaner, perhaps with extra hands and even more implements. There was an article inside about how the cartoonists -- so used to Nixon -- were going to draw Ford. Nixon offered the cartoonist such rich material. Now what were they going to do? Ford looked so normal. And he didn't mean anything to anyone yet. Nixon not only looked weird, he had come to mean so much over the past two decades, and the meaning seemed to burst out of those weird features. We had been talking about his weird features in connection with his character traits for so long. Shifty eyes! Five-o-clock shadow! Ski-jump nose! One cartoonist cited a general principle of cartooning: You have to decide on one feature to exaggerate. Trying to decide on the spot, he said -- maybe this is verbatim: It looks like his chin is giving birth to a golf ball.

I remember watching the speech in which President Ford pardoned Nixon, and I remember thinking -- before I heard all the indignant outcry from my friends -- that he was doing the right thing. I believed his asserted reason: Let it be over. Let's not drag ourselves through the further torment of a criminal prosecution of the man. Let's not dwell on the past. Let's look to the future. He was right about that, wasn't he? Did he throw away his chance in 1976 because he pardoned the man who made him President? I knew a lot of people who considered that unforgivable. They needed to get even farther from Nixon than Ford could take them.

Stuart Spencer, his campaign manager, said that polling data about the pardon had made it clear that “it cost him the election.” He said 7 percent of Republicans had either voted for Mr. Carter or stayed home because of the pardon, and it hurt with Democrats and independents, too.

The NYT obituary (linked above) has this quote:

"It was an hour in our history that troubled our minds and tore at our hearts," he said. "Anger and hatred had risen to dangerous levels, dividing friends and families. The polarization of our political order had aroused unworthy passions of reprisal and revenge. Our governmental system was closer to stalemate than at any time since Abraham Lincoln took that same oath of office."

We might do well to think about that today.

It's a long obituary. There was that Daily News headline: "Ford to City: Drop Dead." I remember seeing that on the stands.

As president, he was quick to assert to Congress, in a play on words that nobody misunderstood, “I am a Ford, not a Lincoln.” If it was true, as was often said, that the Oval Office shaped the occupant, Mr. Ford resisted the temptation of the imperial. On an early trip as president to South Korea, he called American enlisted men “sir.” His prose was so pedestrian and his tongue so unreliable — he referred on one public occasion to the noble American “work ethnic” and on another to the disease of “sickle-cell Armenia” — that he became a favorite target of comedians.

(And then Jimmy Carter replaced him and went around saying "nucular" and got terrorized by a swimming rabbit. Everything was terrible but funny in the 70s.)

John Hersey, after spending a week in close observation of [President Ford] wrote in The New York Times Magazine of April 20, 1975: “What is it in him?”

“Is it an inability to extend compassion far beyond the faces directly in view?” Mr. Hersey wrote. “Is it a failure of imagination? Is it something obdurate he was born with, alongside the energy and serenity?”

The answer seemed to be a belief — one Mr. Ford was schooled in if not born with — in the essential dignity of human struggle. “Everything didn’t turn to gold just because I did it,” he remarked. “I had this foundation, and I had been brought up with the training that — and this is an oversimplification, but I think it’s indicative — the harder you work, the luckier you are. And whether it was in such things as the Boy Scouts or athletics or academics, I worked like hell.”

There were those who contended, as did Richard Reeves, the author of a critical biography, that Mr. Ford had a “tragic gap” in his understanding of such crucial matters as the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal. More common was the assessment of Mr. Ford as “innately decent.”

Mr. Ford disputed the notion that it required forceful, even harsh, character to meet the tests of the White House. He was asked once if a nice guy should be president, and answered: “Those who allege that you’ve got to be a mean, sinister, devious person to be president are just dead wrong. I don’t see how a president in his conscience could be that.”

He, too, could be forceful. He resented the accident of fate that had made him president as the nation watched South Vietnam and Cambodia — where so much of America’s human and economic treasure had been spent by three predecessors — fall to the Communists in 1975. Rebuffed by Congress when he sought a last-minute $972 million in aid to Saigon, Mr. Ford made it possible for 130,000 or more refugees to come to the United States.

When the Cambodian Communists seized the American merchant ship Mayaqüez in May 1975, Mr. Ford reacted with uncharacteristic emotion, sending United States military forces to recapture the ship.

The order was motivated in part by concern for national image. “We had just pulled out of Vietnam, out of Cambodia,” Mr. Ford said later, “and here the United States was being challenged by a group of leaders who were bandits and outlaws, in my opinion, and I think their subsequent record has pretty well proved it. And it was an emotional decision to tell the Defense Department we had to go in there and do something.”

Mr. Ford’s economic policies were traditional for Republican conservatives. He proclaimed, amid considerable White House ballyhoo, a campaign to “Whip Inflation Now,” complete with “WIN” buttons. Scarcely had it begun than mounting joblessness and the worst recession since the 1930s caused Mr. Ford to abandon the anti-inflation program and propose tax cuts to stimulate the economy instead of tax increases to dampen it.

Congress, meanwhile, reflected its dominance by the Democratic Party in a steadily increasing number of spending programs and expansion of the federal deficit.

"Whip Inflation Now"... how we mocked him for that... for everything. At least the NYT obituary spares him the mention of the name of Chevy Chase, who in the early days of "Saturday Night Live" ridiculed him by doing little that had anything to do with him. Chase just acted like an idiot and took endless pratfalls.

We even laughed at the two assassination attempts:

On one of those trips, to Sacramento on Sept. 5, he narrowly escaped an assassination attempt by Lynette (Squeaky) Fromme, who had been a follower of the convicted killer Charles Manson. Mr. Ford was moving through a crowd in Capitol Park, shaking hands and waving, when a Secret Service agent saw Ms. Fromme’s arm and the pistol. She was subdued, and it turned out that while the gun was loaded there was no bullet in the chamber. She was convicted of attempted murder and sentenced to life in prison.

The other attempt, by Sara Jane Moore, took place in San Francisco. A former Marine, Oliver W. Sipple, knocked a pistol out of Ms. Moore’s hand as she fired.

These were only absurd because they failed. Gerald Ford went on to live to be very old, mostly out of our view. And now he's gone. R.I.P.

Christopher Hitchens on botched-joke-o-gate.

(Or whatever it's called.) In the WSJ:

Regrettable though it might be for the United States military to become an untouchable "third rail" in American politics, there can be little sympathy for someone who keeps on brushing against that rail just to see what will happen. One could have assumed that Sen. John Kerry, who has reason enough to wake up whimpering and biting his knuckles when he reflects on past embarrassments, had learned this lesson. He's almost spoiled for choice in the matter--from the cringe-making "reporting for duty" to the sickly discovery that he had been part of a "band of brothers" rather than a bunch of killers, to the phantom "Christmas in Cambodia."

Yet of all the days that he might want to have back and do over again, last week's clumsy appearance in Pasadena must be the most whimper-inducing of all.

The senator's labored defense of himself is so lame that it has to be true.

Oh, why is Hitchens being so charitable to Kerry?!

Anyway, read the whole thing. He talks of the email he's gotten from soldiers in Iraq:

Many of my respondents agreed that his words may not have meant or intended quite what they first seemed to mean, but they also felt that the klutziness was Freudian, so to speak, in that the senator's patrician contempt for grunts and dogfaces was bound to come out sooner or later.

One thing I already knew is confirmed--there is a very great deal of class resentment in these United States. Another thing I wasn't so sure of is also confirmed--James Webb in Virginia is right to stress the huge rage felt by those of Scots-Irish provenance who feel that they have born the heat and burden of the day in America's wars, and been rewarded with disdain.

Those of Scots-Irish provenance.

Anyway, Hitchens has a proposal to deal with the race-class problem he perceives:

Sen. Kerry and his party should publicly demand that the U.S. military be allowed to recruit openly on elite campuses. And the supposed reason for the ban on ROTC--the continuing refusal of the armed services to admit known homosexuals--should be dispelled at a stroke by a presidential order rescinding the Clintonian nonsense of "don't ask/don't tell."

"Maybe I am already dead. But I will continue to believe that I am alive."

That's an example of the rather cool blogging style of 82-year-old King Norodom Sihanouk of Cambodia.

Kerry on "Meet the Press."

The Kerry interview on today's "Meet the Press" is exactly what you would expect. There are many of the familiar lines from the campaign, including the repeated assertion that he had a better way to handle things in Iraq. Now, success in Iraq depends entirely on the "four-point plan," which he (he says) articulated precisely and clearly during the campaign and which still applies.



Tim Russert shows Kerry that devastating clip that will haunt him forever: he voted for funding the Iraq War before he voted against it. Kerry once again responds that he picked a bad way to express himself about the war, but Bush picked a bad way to conduct the war.



Kerry is trying to define a moderate Democratic position that is distinct enough from the Bush Adminstration and somewhat distant from the strong anti-war element of the party but that also avoids alienating the anti-war element. That's a difficult task, and there's no reason at all to think that Kerry will be any good at it. Kerry is displaying his most annoying tic: insisting that he's being clear and precise when he's fuzzing over everything. And I'm sympathetic to the problem of trying to explain and defend a moderate position! I'm a moderate!



Russert sadistically shows Kerry a photograph of himself sitting just behind Bush, who is giving his Inaugural Address. Russert asks what was going through his head at the time. Kerry says "respect for the process." What is he supposed to say? We're left to imagine what he was really thinking. It's got to be something like: I can't believe that little #@!* beat me!



Russert asks Kerry if the Osama bin Laden tape, released shortly before the election, caused him to lose. Kerry gives a classic Kerry answer where it seems as though he's saying yes and no at the same time. He'd been rising in the polls before the tape came out and after that he "flat-lined," but it was really 9/11 that determined the election. He essentially says that, given 9/11, Bush was destined to win, and he (Kerry) ought to be given credit for coming as close as he did. Of course, Kerry only got the nomination because he presented himself as the one candidate who could actually win (as opposed to express clear ideas about the party's values) -- which stuck Democrats with the double pain of listening to his uninspiring equivocating and losing.



But he's proud, he's proud of what we did, Tim. Kerry presents the facts about the number of voters in Ohio whose different vote would have swung the election his way. He uses the image of half the number of people at an Ohio State football game, and Russert comes back, saying half the people at a high school football game in New Hampshire would have swung the election back to Bush. Kerry can't really respond other that to note lamely that that is the system. (You know, the one he was contemplating with respect during Bush's Inauguration Speech.) Kerry tries to crowbar in the argument that Bush doesn't have a mandate other than a "mandate for unity," and Russert retaliates with Kerry's vote against Condoleezza Rice. His answer is something along the lines of: I was for her at the same time I was against her.



Remember when we had to listen to Kerry's tiresome explanations every day? What's the point of listening to him now? It's oh so dreary, and on a day when we should be feeling very happy about the Iraqi elections. I guess "Meet the Press" is a nice haven for anyone who doesn't want to have to see positive Bush-related news. Come on over here and wallow in despair. Gaze upon the haggard, hang-dog face that represents your dashed hopes!



But the great Tim Russert is making things hard to enjoy. Getting all Russert-y now, Russert shows Kerry the clip of Swift Boat Vet Steve Gardner in the Christmas in Cambodia -- "categorically a lie" -- commercial and then reads quotes from a lot of newspaper pieces. I lose count of the number of times Russert says the word "seared." The big question: "Were you in Cambodia, Christmas eve, 1968?" Kerry: "We were right on the border, Tim." And he's explained this already, "any number of times." Haven't you learned yet that if you think there's some question that Kerry hasn't already answered, it's always your problem -- you just haven't been listening properly?



Why hasn't he signed the form 180 and let people have access to his military records? You shouldn't be the "filter" for this information, Russert says. Kerry repeats that he released the information that he has received from the government, and Russert has to repeat the question: will you sign form 180? Kerry says a quick yes and goes on to a lot of other equivocation. So, yes! All right, let's see if we get it.



The unspent $14 million in the Kerry campaign fund: why didn't he spend it? The multipart answer: he did spend a lot of money, it was too hard to spend money, a reserve was needed, and -- most emphatically -- lack of spending was not the reason he lost. "A few more television ads in Ohio wouldn't have turned over those 70,000 voters?" Russert asks. Kerry: "There was no request for them." It's the staff's fault, as usual.



Kerry denounced Dean during the primaries, so can he support Dean for the Democratic Party chairmanship? Kerry says yes, and gives a long explanation that pushes me over the line and beyond my willingness to attempt to summarize blather. (Which I have a fair amount of -- have you noticed?)



After the break, the subject turns to the "moral values" angle of post-election analysis. Kerry speaks well about the need to include pro-life people in the Democratic Party. He clearly states, however, that he would vote against any Supreme Court nominee who is opposed to Roe v. Wade. He says he doesn't think that Bush wants to see Roe v. Wade overturned. He states that he would vote against Justice Scalia if he were nominated for Chief Justices, and says that he was wrong years ago when he voted to confirm Scalia.



Social security is next. He's opposed to Bush's plan and thinks Bush is "hyping a phony crisis." All that's needed to solve the problem is to roll back Bush's tax cuts. There is a tedious assertion about how "rolling back" the tax cuts ought not to be called "raising taxes."



Given a chance to end on a high note, Kerry says he learned a lot running for President and how great the people of the United States are.



Ah! It's over! What a relief!



UPDATE: I've added a link to the transcript and put in the "not" that was missing from that sentence about "rolling back" tax cuts.

12 observations about John Kerry on "The Daily Show."

Assorted observations made while watching John Stewart's Daily Show interview of John Kerry. (Full transcript at Wonkette.)



1. John Kerry has a sheepish look on his face as he lumbers out, which I interpret to mean that he thinks it's a bit odd for him to be on the show. As he's walking he spreads his arms open a bit, as if to say, here I am. He claps once, which I interpret to mean: I am here to have fun.



2. Rather than wait for Stewart's first question, he says, "I didn't understand it. Turf, trees and boxes," which refers to a pretty funny segment earlier on the show and reinforces my belief that he really wants to show he's having a great time. It sounds a bit forced, but so what? He prolongs it with: "That's why I'm running for President. We're stamping them out. Turf, trees and boxes. ... And agencies I--" Stewart cuts him off--mercifully?--so we don't get to find out where he was going with that "I." Actually, it might be fun to hear where a liberal Senator would go with the idea of "stamping out agencies" ... but probably not that much fun. Better to let Stewart steer us into the fun.



3. Stewart opens with "I watch a lot of the cable news shows. So I understand that apparently you were never in Vietnam." Kerry leans his head back and laughs heartily, because he's having fun, you know? Even though there's no way this matter can be fun for him. He says his line--"That's what I understand, too. But I-- I'm trying to find out what happened ... That part of my life. I don't know."--with a smile, but not such a broad smile. It's a bit of a wince. When he says the last part he puts his hand out, palm down, and gives the little back and forth rotation gesture that normally signifies: I'm not quite getting this right. He then clasps his hands in his lap, and his forced smile falls away, as Stewart launches into the next question. Kerry rubs his nose with his knuckle.



4. The "overtalk" in the transcript after Stewart asks "Is it-- do you-- do you-- is it hard not to take it personally?" is in fact easy to understand. Kerry says: "They said that too." That means that the interchange that follows--Stewart's "Oh, with you as well?" and Kerry's "Yeah"--refers to Stewart's previous joke, that the Swift Boat problem is like having your friends say that 35 years ago you "had cooties."



5. Stewart tries to get Kerry to talk about how this attack makes him feel, which is a little like the old what-if-your-wife-was-raped question asked of Michael Dukakis in the 1988 presidential debates. And Kerry, like Dukakis, ignores the opportunity to show passionate feeling. (By the way: I liked when Dukakis did that. I don't want a hothead President, and it was an opportunity to display rationality and deep-rooted oppostion to the death penalty. No one else seems to think so, however.) Kerry simply plugs in the argument that Bush is relying on these attacks because he doesn't want to talk about his record. This plugged-in argument bugs me because: 1. Bush does not control the speech of the Swift Boat Vets and 2. Kerry just used the whole Democratic Convention, which he did control, to talk about his Vietnam record and not anything more recent.



6. The transcript at this point says:

You know what it is, Jon? It-- it-- it's disappointing because I think most Americans would like to have a much more intelligent conversation about where the country's going. And-- (APPLAUSE) yeah, I think that-- you know, and-- and, yeah, it's a little bit disappointing.

There's a pause after "going," and there is no reaction from the audience. Kerry starts to slowly say "and," at which point there's a sudden cheer from the audience. I'd like to see the long view of the set at that point, because surely, an applause sign or human cheerleader was required for that response.



7. Stewart asks him if he was "surprised" by the attack. As I've written a couple times in the last few days, Kerry should have seen the attack coming. He says:

Sure I'm surprised. But surprised in a sense. But now that I begin to see the web and the network, I'm not surprised. I think-- you know, it's politics. And for whatever reasons, the-- the-- and I think Americans will discover it as we go forward in the next four or five weeks, George Bush doesn't wanna talk about the real issues. I mean, what's he gonna do? Come out and say we lost 1.8 million jobs? ...

The web and the network. It's a veritable skein of connections, isn't it? And only now can he see it. And then he fumbles back to his big talking point: Bush doesn't want to talk about the issues.



8. As he goes into shopping list mode--jobs, health care, the environment, everyone in the world being angry at us--Stewart interrupts with what is for some a serious question but what Stewart surely sees--as his finger-wagging and tone of voice reveal--as another example of a distracting non-issue:

Sir, I'm sorry. Were you or were you not in Cambodia on Christmas Eve? (LAUGHTER) They said-- you said five miles. They said three. (LAUGHTER)

Kerry throws his head back and laughs. At "they said three," he scratches his left thigh quite vigorously. [CORRECTION: right thigh!] Stewart leans way forward, resting on his crossed arms, in comic imitation of a stern interrogator, and stares straight at Kerry. Kerry gets the idea and does a mirror-image pose, with their faces five inches apart, which is either cute or scary, depending on who you're planning to vote for in November.



9. Stewart asks "Are you the number one most liberal senator in the Senate?" and I realize that this is the exact point where I fell asleep last night when I was watching the show live in the room without a TiVo.



10. Kerry keeps plugging in his stump speech and it isn't very lively or fun or personal, which seemed like the idea of going on "The Daily Show." Stewart leans forward to make a quip, and Kerry reaches out with both hands and grabs him and mutters something unintelligible. I think Kerry could see that he needed to give Stewart a chance to make the situation fun. Stewart's question was, "Can-- can you get me on a network?" which I find really funny, in part because it's typical of the jokes we make around the house when listening to one of Kerry's lists of promises: Will you come over and pay my bills? Can you help me with my homework?



11. Wonkette got a big kick out of this line:

Well, you should hear some of-- I'm telling you. The-- the-- no, I-- I shouldn't go into that out here. But I've been in some-- some-- you'd be amazed the number of people who wanna introduce themselves to you in the men's room.

In case you're wondering where the hell that came from or was going (he didn't get to finish), I'm certain it was a reference to the GQ article, "A Beer With John Kerry," which begins with an anecdote about the author being treated coldly by Kerry when he tried to talk with him as he was coming out of a men's room. (Who wants to shake hands with a guy that just came out of the men's room?) I'd guess that Kerry sees "The Daily Show" in a way similar to the "A Beer" article: a chance to get personal and to show he's a regular guy. But Stewart has to stop him, because he's running out of time and he really does have a lovely ketchup joke. Kerry takes the joke gracefully.



12. After Stewart ends the interview and the audience applauds, Kerry turns to the audience and SALUTES! He doesn't wave, he salutes. The kids love that.

Spalding Gray. I've written about him before--here, here, and here. I can't say how sad I am to know he's dead. What a brilliant man. There are many monologuists, including one I love as much as Spalding Gray, but there is no one else at all like him. I have driven all over the country listening to my tapes of Monster in a Box over and over. Also The Terrors of Pleasure. Everyone should see Swimming to Cambodia. We saw him perform Gray's Anatomy here at the University Theater years ago, with his plain table and chair and notebook and glass of water. From the NYT:

It was a muted end for Mr. Gray, whose singular talent was closely observed autobiography, performed in a style that alternated between conspiratorial whispers and antic screams as he roamed through topics large and small.

Very, very sad. Hearing his monologues, I always found it hard to believe he could have been as sad and he was saying he was, because he was so funny and so deep. I'd like to think he wouldn't have left us if he hadn't also been in physical pain. Love to his wife and children.

Gay marriage in .... Cambodia! King Norodom Sihanouk has an opinion, according to BBC news:

After watching television images of gay marriages in San Francisco, the 81-year-old monarch has decided that single sex weddings should be allowed in Cambodia too.

He expressed his views in a hand written message on his website which has proved extremely popular in Cambodia.

The king said that as a "liberal democracy", Cambodia should allow "marriage between man and man... or between woman and woman."

He said he had respect for homosexual and lesbians and said they were as they were because God loved a "wide range of tastes."

Those televised images are powerful.