Dateline: above the garage in Portsmouth RI, 24 January 2005
About my tenth hour of shoveling in this storm this morning and I pulled something very valuable in my back, triggering the sort of spasm-ridden, lock-down I haven't achieved since my high-jumping days in HS track.
As I pondered my age from my bed, my wife paid two guys $30 to do the rest of the drive with their machinery. No, I protested, if it's not taller than me I still think I can lick it!
Vonne's reply: It's taller than me, so I'm paying.
I will not go in for muscle relaxants, because I can't spare the brain time, but I will be spending lots of intimacy with my heating pad for at least the next 24-48 hours.
I am now officially middle-aged. Being from Wisconsin, always a point of pride to lick any snow storm by hand, but I will consider the blower for next year. Time waits for no man, much less my wife.
Two stories in the NY Times (electronic edition, of course) worth mentioning: 1) "Shiites in Iraq Say Government Will be Secular," by Dexter Filkins; and 2) "Pentagon Sends Its Spies to Join Fight on Terror," by Eric Schmitt.
On first, despite largess from Iran, local Iraqi Shiite leaders say they are committed to secularism, both because it's what the Iraqi people will expect and because the Americans will probably leave faster if they go this route. As I said on Blitzer: we shouldn't be worried about an Iraq dominated by Shiites in bed with Iran, Iran should be worried about an Iraq led by Shiites that isn't a theocracy.
On second, so many want to make a big fuss on this one. It is completely prosaic. Defense Dept. didn't really do terror before 9/11, so never cared about having "organic" (meaning, its own) intell assets devoted to that. Now, Special Ops Command is on the case big time, so voila! DoD wants its own organic assets to support SOCOM, preferring not to rely on CIA. Is this the rise of the Waffen SS, as some might hyperbolicize? Please. DoD has a host of organic intell services (all built around services, not around a command like SOCOM), and now it wants to build up its own specifically for this new task that will become a mainstay for the Special Ops Command for years to come.
Look ahead to a major terrorist strike in the US. Imagine finding out that DoD made no effort to beef up this capacity after assigning this very task to SOCOM years earlier. Imagine the finger-pointing on that one. If the intell crowd at Langley caught terrorists as well as they pen bestselling books describing their failures, then it wouldn't be an issue, but they don't. So maybe DoD should have its own intell assets, and maybe they can reach for this capability without sending the whole country into fascism.
I wish the American people just a little more faith than that. You know, we're already issuing long-term sentences on Abu Ghraib to our own people. Know any other country that moves to correct mistakes that fast?
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