Jacob Levy, a political science professor at the University of Chicago and contributor to the Volokh Conspiracy blog, argued in May that the Bush camp was in "bafflingly deep denial" about losing Libertarian swing voters in '04. He says that Edwards for veep makes the Kerry ticket a lock for him, in light of the Bush administration's exceptional incompetence in policymaking. (Note to New York Post: Levy also says that a Gephardt pick would've been a Kerry deal-breaker for him.)

"This is really the first presidential race of my adult life in which I've had a very strong commitment about which major-party candidate was the lesser evil. I've had leanings in previous races, but they were uncertain, and typically mitigated by a sense that both major-party candidates had crossed some threshold of unacceptability. This time, it seems very clear to me that the Bush Administration has failed basic tests of competence in policymaking and execution, and of trusteeship of long-term interests like alliances and trade negotiations and moral credibility. I expect to dislike an awful lot of John Kerry's policies. But I don't expect that kind of failure of the basic responsibilities of the office. Four or eight or twelve years ago, I guess I wouldn't have known how important I found those considerations, as I hadn't seen a president who had failed along those dimensions. Now I have, and I do."

"Narrow-minded nationalists"
Though by no means a die-hard conservative, Anne Applebaum, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author and occasional contributor to neocon journals, detailed her own disillusionment with the Bush White House in a recent essay in the New Republic. She's incredulous that an administration stacked with Cold War veterans could be so myopic when it comes to battling the rising threat of radical Islam.

"Incredibly, given their backgrounds, top Bush officials still seem not to understand that, like communism, radical Islam cannot be defeated with military power alone. Like communism, radical Islam is an ideology -- one that people will die for. To fight it, the United States needs not just to show off its firepower, but also to prove to Arabs that Western values, in some moderate Islamic form, will give them better lives. The war on terrorism cannot be a narrow American or American-Israeli military struggle, or we will lose it. Like the cold war, the war on terrorism will be over when moderate Muslims abandon the radicals and join us.

"Mistakenly, I assumed this was what the president meant when he talked, in that vague sort of way, about 'democracy in the Middle East.' The fact that he was vague didn't bother me, since this president is vague about a lot of things. But I should have been warier since, in this case, his vagueness was not just a personality tic or a speech impediment, but a sign of a deep lack of seriousness."

Applebaum sees a dangerous provincialism percolating the administration's hollow rhetoric.

"The truth, of course, is that, for all its talk of universal human rights, this is not an administration that actually perceives itself as a part of something greater than the United States. For all of its talk about spreading American values to benighted foreigners, this is not an administration that even likes foreigners. It never occurred to me that American troops would arrive in Baghdad and have absolutely no idea what to do next, or who was important, or who was on their side. But then, I hadn't realized that the Pentagon leadership had no interest in or knowledge of the Iraqi people. I thought these were cold warriors, whereas in fact they are narrow-minded American nationalists, isolationists turned inside out."

The rise of "black blog ops"?
In a recent column for the Weekly Standard, right-wing pundit Hugh Hewitt raised some interesting questions about the ascent of the Web as a source of political news and information.

"Like a reverse Atlantis, a new archipelago of opinion and news providers has risen up from nowhere to drive stories and news cycles. So we should be asking about the potential for deception in the format. The web is widely used and relied upon. It would not be hard for intelligence services from around the world to build blogs with an intent to deceive or manipulate, putting out solid content to gain an initial audience before using it to disseminate disinformation intentionally.

"Similarly, the inevitable backstab blog has to be on some political consultant's mind. Get it started and growing as a pro candidate X blog. Build an audience via tried and true techniques -- including the purchase of blog-ads -- and then, late in a campaign, have the blog turn on candidate X. If any of the high profile lefties at work today --the Daily Kos or Atrios, for example -- were to suddenly turn on Kerry, citing implausibility fatigue, for example -- that would be news and a blow to Kerry. Could Kos really be working for Rove? The costs of starting a blog are so low that the mischief potential is quite high ...

"It is a brave new blogging world, and mischief beyond the easily spotted inanities of the MoveOn.org crowd will no doubt follow."

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Read more of "Right Hook," Salon's weekly roundup of conservative commentary and analysis here.

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