Johnny, we hardly knew ye

I was not impressed with John Edwards' performance on the ticket four year ago, but late last year he was starting to win me over. The callow candidate of 04 appeared to have employed his down time to good effect, like a conscientious trial lawyer preparing for a court date. He seemed more thoughtful and more seasoned, and I thought I caught a whiff of RFK, another unpromising youngster who cleaned up better than expected. By the time of the California primary, though, he'd bailed, and I cast my vote for the Swarthy Guy.

We now learn that Edwards was going for the gold with an ingot of infidelity in his recent personal history — and what an infidelity! My stars and stripes, this man is within a year the near side of my own age, and a character like this doesn't cause his deeper reflexes to scream run away?

Regarding the actual morality of the thing I am, alas, unable to hold forth: in consequence of certain youthful sins and indiscretions the Special Subcommittee on Moral Abuses long ago banned me for life from participation in the Olympic stone-casting event, much as I'd love to play.

In a perfect world, or in a better world, at least, than this pellet of muck we are obliged to share with one another, the lapses of our candidates might be treated with the judicious perspective an anonymous Chicagoan brought to bear upon the news that 1884 presidential contender Grover Cleveland was implicated in an out-of-wedlock paternity scandal:

We are told that Mr. Blaine has been delinquent in office but blameless in private life, while Mr. Cleveland has been a model of official integrity but culpable in personal relations. We should therefore elect Mr. Cleveland to the public office which he is so well qualified to fill, and remand Mr. Blaine to the private station he is admirably fitted to adorn.

Of course, Cleveland was a character of Cromwellian rectitude (lacking, thank God, the corresponding Cromwellian severity), and Edwards has shown himself...not so much. I do not fault him for lack of priapic self-restraint, but I take it very ill indeed that having let the Little Head lead the Big Head into realms forbidden to serious candidates ever since the Monkey Business business, he nevertheless partied as if it was 1968, and offered himself up as the standard-bearer for a cause far greater than himself, with the potential to put it at mortal peril. If this was done cold-bloodedly, then I cannot disparage his cynicism enough. If, as I am (perhaps charitably) slightly inclined to believe, he had contrived to persuade himself that the secret would not emerge, or that his candidacy could somehow survive it in a world in which Maureen Dowd is granted a column in the Paper of Record to vent her patented spinster's brew of the toxic and the trivial, then he is merely deluded rather than sociopathically selfish. Still, this remains a deal-breaker. I do not require that a president possess better-than average personal morals, but I do look for a better-than average resistance to self-deception. We have, after all, experimented with fantasy-based policymaking these ninety months past, and I trust that most of recognize how that has turned out.

San Francisco Chronicle columnist Deborah Saunders avers that were she a Democrat she'd be "spittin' mad." Alas, on the evidence of her columns the past dozen years she's merely barking mad.

It is suggested that some in the Clinton camp now believe that but for Edwards' tainted candidacy the junior Senator from New York would have extinguished the flickering Obama campaign in Iowa. If this is true, then the former junior Senator from North Carolina should be entitled—not to the Justice Department, but to a parole from political limbo once a year on the anniversary of his providential interference.

Graphic design we can believe in

This is by far the finest political poster produced on behalf of an American presidential candidate that I have seen in the 48 years since I first began to pay attention. And then there's...this.

V as Soviet poster girl

I took this picture in April 1973 on the grounds of the University of California at Santa Cruz. It has always been one of my favorites among the (shockingly few) photos of her I possess. Remembering that time, I now think of a passage from Kingsley Amis' novel Lucky Jim:

As he left the bar with Christine at his side, Dixon felt like a special agent, a picaroon, a Chicago war-lord, a hidalgo, an oil baron, a mohock. He kept careful control over his features to stop them doing what they wanted to do and breaking out into an imbecile smirk of excitement and pride. When she turned and faced him on the edge of the floor, he found it hard to believe that she was really going to let him touch her, or that the men near them wouldn't spontaneously intervene to prevent him...

Veronica

She liked this poem, I remember, even though she disdained the George Kline translation:

Once more we're living by the bay,

and clouds of black smoke drift, daily, above us.

Our own Vesuvius has cleared its throat;

volcanic ash is settling in the side streets.

Our windowpanes have rattled to its roaring.

Some day we too will be shrouded with ashes.

And when that happens, at that awful moment,

I'd like to take a streetcar to the outskirts

of town and find your house;

and if, after a thousand years,

a swarm of scientists should come here

to dig our city out, I hope they'll find me,

cloaked with the ashes of our modern epoch,

and everlastingly within your arms.

—Joseph Brodsky

Heavy traffic

I devised The Diebold Variations on a caffeinated whim 46 months ago, and was sufficiently pleased with them that I created a quick-and-dirty web page to share the conceit with a few friends. A couple of months later they came to the attention of Arianna Huffington, who plugged them in her blog, resulting in a surge of about 25,000 visits that June. Since then interest has risen and declined with the election cycles, but the general trend has been downward, with an average of 300 visits/month for most of the past year. This left me unprepared for a spike of just over 41,000 visits in the course of the twenty-four hours comprising last Wednesday. Criminentlies! Another increment of my fifteen minutes of fame! The good people at dotmac have already objected to my profligate use of their bandwidth.

I'm a little puzzled that the New Hampshire primary, fercrissake, appears to have been the occasion of the present kerfuffle. I'm actually an agnostic on the subject of e-vote fraud, having undertaken the project principally as a designer, and not as anyone who has meditated at length on, much less mastered, the technical impedimenta. Those of you craving red-meat analyses of the geek stuff should depart these precincts and head for Bev Harris' admirable Black Box Voting site. I do believe that instruments for committing vote fraud without undue effort either in the perpetration or the concealment ought not be left lying around where Karl Rove might find them, but when election fraud is the first conclusion arrived at by the losing side it creeps me out just a little bit.

The boy Kant help it

Found on Crooked Timber, a Kant attack ad!

Urschleim reborn!

I tried. Vishnu knows, I tried to make it work with "IBlog," the worthy offering from a little one-man software house in distant Hindustan, but at the end, and with this morning's, ah, fraught upgrade to the long-overdue v.2, I need to walk away from the crater and begin anew. So: same name, saner authoring environment, perhaps more frequent attention from its onlie true begetter. We'll have to see, won't we?