I made it through about twenty minutes of last night’s Republican Presidential debate.

Watching the candidates dodge questions about what would happen if, come September, the situation in Iraq has shown no discernible improvement, I was reminded of a scene from Penelope Spheeris’s excellent 1988 documentary The Decline & Fall of Western Civilization II: The Metal Years.

At one point in the film, the director is talking to the singer of an unsigned hair metal band. The guy is sitting in a hot tub for the interview, drinking champagne and flanked by bikini-clad girls. He’s going on about how the band will get signed, become incredibly popular, and everything will be great.

“But what if you don’t get signed?” Spheeris asks him.

A blank look comes over his face. “There’s no way that can’t happen,” he says.

“Okay, but just for the sake of argument, imagine that it doesn’t. Do you have any other plans?”

The singer’s face remains blank, as though he’s been asked a question in some foreign language. “I can’t even imagine we won’t make it huge. It’s just impossible.”

Spheeris wisely moves on to another topic at this point.

Unfortunately, The Metal Years is not available on DVD. If it were, I would recommend renting it and comparing this scene to the endless variations on “We have to win” provided by the Republican front-runners. Despite all evidence to the contrary, these guys are still insisting that winning the war in Iraq is possible. We just have to try/wish hard enough, and stop listening to the defeatist, blame-America-first crowd (a.k.a., Democrats, liberals, and the news media).

Mitt Romney’s dodge was a straight-up lie, as he insisted we had no way of knowing that Saddam didn’t pose a real threat despite the fact that UN weapons inspectors were in Iraq pretty much right up until the U.S. invaded. McCain stuck to the same tired rhetoric he’s been using for the past few years—we’ve got to win, it’s a struggle for our existence, we need to put politics aside, blah blah blah. Meanwhile, Giuliani went with his tried-and-true “9/11, 9/11, 9/11, 9/11, the brown-skinned people want to kill you” line.

I didn’t make it much further through the debate. Around the point when every single candidate expressed being willing and ready to nuke Iran, I found myself growing too disgusted to continue watching. I finally turned it off once they started falling all over each other declaring the evils of amnesty of illegal aliens.

For the record, this is way too early for election season to be starting.

UPDATE: Digby, as usual, sums the debate up pretty well:

The rhetoric coming out of these guys is really quite extreme, even by GOP standards, but I guess that’s just because the front runners are all a bunch of flipflopping hypocrites who have to fake some kind of red-meat qualifications for the base. They’ve opted for bullying machismo, which is actually quite smart. It’s the tie that binds. They certainly have given up on the “law ‘n order” platform with their nearly unanimous support for a Scooter pardon — especially the ex-federal prosecutor Giuliani who couldn’t stop whining and twisting his little lace hankie about how unfair it all was.

The Bees are a British band who, for reasons that don’t interest me enough to be worth investigating, are known in the States as “Band of Bees.” Their new album Octopus just came out.

This record is all over the map. There are songs that sound like the Band. There are songs that sound like REO Speedwagon (yes, REO Speedwagon). There’s a song that sounds like Woodstock-era Santana, and another which finds the band channeling Sam & Dave. If there is anything tying the tracks together as a whole, it would be the Bees’ unfortunate jam-band tendencies. They never reach full-on Phish/Moe territory, but there was enough hippification going on here to piss me off relatively quickly.

Perhaps the band’s strategy was to throw as much as possible at the wall and see what stuck. Unfortunately, if that is their strategy on Octopus, it hasn’t worked out so well. Some of the songs are catchy at first, but I challenge the listener to remember anything about any track on this album five minutes after it ends. The Bees fail to come up with a single memorable song here, and they waste the listener’s time with pointless stylistic detours.

This record might be fine for putting on in the background at a party, especially if a bunch of hippies have shown up to your party and you want to distract them in the other room so they won’t spoil your party with their reek of patchouli and constant talk of the global conspiracy to suppress free-trade hemp. That is really the only good thing I can think of to say about Octopus. Otherwise, avoid, avoid, avoid.

John Edwards, by all accounts, went after Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama in last night’s Democratic Presidential debate regarding their stances on the Iraq war. Here’s the New York Times:

“There are differences between us,” said Mr. Edwards, who has campaigned hard for the support of antiwar Democrats. “And I think Democratic voters deserve to know the differences between us. I think there is a difference between making very clear when the crucial moment comes, on Congress ending this war, what your position is, and standing quiet.”

Edwards, who, as Obama was quick to point out, voted for and supported the war during his time in the Senate, has gotten quite a bit of mileage out of his “I was wrong” line during this campaign. “I was wrong,” he says, over and over, every time the question of the war comes up, following quickly with “and I take responsibility for that.” Clinton, meanwhile, and Obama to a lesser extent, continue to take hits from the left over their support (implicit and explicit) for the war, or for their perceived lack of enthusiasm for ending it.

However, it is not clear just what Edwards means when he says he takes responsibility for his previous support of the war.

Unlike Clinton and Obama, Edwards has left the Senate. His about-face on the war, therefore, poses little risk to him. No longer answerable to the voters that put him in the Senate, Edwards is free to disavow his prior stance. While he may lose support among a small contingent of North Carolina voters, it’s likely that this loss will be more than offset by the national support he gains from his new position.

In addition, Edwards no longer has to worry about gaining or losing support of other Senators. As sitting members of the Senate, Clinton and Obama need to think about the impact their campaign positions will have on pending and future legislation.

In this context, “taking responsibility” for supporting the war when it was popular to do so now that he has little to lose and a lot to gain is a fairly empty claim. In many ways, it mirrors the born-again phenomenon so popular among Christian Conservatives. George W. Bush had his come-to-Jesus moment with Billy Graham, and now feels no need to answer for the draft-dodging, drunk-driving, and coke-snorting with which he filled his days before becoming a successful politician. Tom Delay found god, and considers his Hot Tub Tom days behind him.

Edwards’ turn-around on the war is, on the surface, a welcome change. Nonetheless, the fact that he came to this position only when it was convenient to do so and now uses it as a rhetorical club with which to bash his political competitors is discouraging.

I’ve been using the recently released Pidgin 2.0 for a few weeks now. It’s pretty impressive

You may be more familiar with Pidgin’s previous incarnation, Gaim Instant Messenger. Gaim originated as an open-source clone of AOL’s Instant Messenger, but quickly expanded to work with multiple IM protocols. I was never that big a fan of he 1.x series of Gaim releases—the application had plenty of features, but seemed buggy. Making matters worse was the rather clunky interface.

The 2.0 beta version proved to be a big improvement over the previous generation. In addition to being a lot more stable, Gaim 2.0 beta featured a significantly cleaned-up interface. Unfortunately it languished in beta for an extremely long time, the result, apparently, of extended legal negotiations/scuffles between the developers and AOL, who had grown increasingly fussy about the name “Gaim.”

Now that said negotiations are complete, the name has been changed to Pidgin, and development is again moving forward. The full, non-beta 2.x (currently, 2.0.1) version boasts a clean, easy-to-use interface, and I have not experienced a single problem or bug in four weeks of use.

If you’re currently using Trillian, or worse, the actual AOL, Yahoo, or MSN-supplied single-protocol proprietary clients, I would highly recommend giving Pidgin a try. It’s free and open-source (the same cannot be said of any of the aforementioned alternatives), and it runs on both Windows and Linux. If you’re a Mac user, Adium, and excellent multi-protocol IM client based on the Gaim/Pidgin code.

Kevin Drum wrote about this topic on his blog at Washington Monthly a few weeks ago, but with Fred Thompson edging closer to declaring his candidacy for the Republican Presidential nomination, it bears repeating.

The backstory is that in the mid-Nineties, when Thompson was running for the Senate, he supposedly drove himself around in a beat-up red pickup truck. Given the emerging popular narrative regarding Thompson’s “folksy charm,” it is somewhat understandable that this tale should lead to laughably credulous stories like this one in Newsweek, which ends,

Thompson, who now lives in Virginia, hasn’t driven his pickup in several years. The paint is peeling and its U.S. Senate license plates expired back in 2002. Mark Corallo, a spokesman, says Thompson “just hasn’t had the heart to sell her.” “I don’t know if the truck will be resurrected,” he told NEWSWEEK, adding that Thompson has made no decision about 2008. In other words, he’s still idling in the driveway.

A few days ago, that Newsweek article was the first result returned by Googling “Fred Thompson truck.” Fortunately, it’s now #5, beaten out by a series of links commenting on this hollow farce. Among them is Michelle Cottle’s 1996 Washington Monthly piece entitled “Another Beltway Bubba?”:

Finishing his talk, Thompson shakes a few hands, then walks out with the rest of the crowd to the red pickup truck he made famous during his 1994 Senate campaign. My friend stands talking with her colleagues as the senator is driven away by a blond, all-American staffer. A few minutes later, my friend gets into her car to head home. As she pulls up to the stop sign at the parking lot exit, rolling up to the intersection is Senator Thompson, now behind the wheel of a sweet silver luxury sedan. He gives my friend a slight nod as he drives past. Turning onto the main road, my friend passes the school’s small, side parking area. Lo and behold: There sits the abandoned red pickup, along with the all-American staffer.

The lesson here is that as reporters on tight deadlines look to pad out stories with titles like “Thompson Prepares For a Role of a Lifetime,” we can bet that the truck story will be repeatedly and uncritically dredged up. However, we would do well to keep in mind that, like Thompson’s “law and order” image, this story is fake. He rented the truck for the campaign and didn’t even drive it himself. On top of that, he couldn’t even be bothered to be driven around in the truck any more than was absolutely necessary for the sake of the cameras.

That having been said, it will be interesting to see how Thompson’s burgeoning campaign fairs. Thus far, the Republican base has been swallowing its distaste for McRomniani, based mostly on the trio’s one-upsmanship over torturing evil terrorists. The media, meanwhile seems to have finally soured on McCain, turned skeptical regarding Romney, and be of two minds about Giuliani.

In a contest that seems to largely be about who can most claim the hagiographied mantle of St. Reagan, Thompson has a number advantages. He’s an actor, he’s physically imposing, he’s from the South, and there is, of course, the aforementioned folksy charm.

At the same time, while Obama routinely gets criticized on the Democratic side for his dearth of experience, Fred Thompson’s record in the Senate is almost completely devoid of achievement. In addition, he’s managed to get elected to exactly one public office, and it’s unclear how he will perform on a national stage. At this point, he enjoys pretty good press coverage, and there seems to be a rather vocal “Run, Fred, run” contingent among Republican voters. As has been pointed out in other places, though, the same can be said of Wes Clark, but he’s on a perpetual campaign to nowhere.