I was initially supposed to attend a breakfast with the other surrogates at 7, but had to miss this in favor of actually being a surrogate. It would've been nice to see and hear Pat first thing in the morning, but I don't need a pep talk and the very idea of looking at food let alone eating it at such an ungodly hour makes me slightly ill. Fortified by some pretty strong coffee, I sallied forth into the fray. . . . Translated into political terms, this means that whomever is winning now will continue to win that those in power now will continue to be in power, an assumption particularly attractive to those intellectuals not a few, unfortunately who worship at the altar of Power. Groveling comes naturally to the kind of mid-level intellectuals who inhabit the punditocracy and the world of journalism.
War can change polling numbers and much else.
At the end of August the UN arms inspectors will be clamoring to be let into Iraq, and the proudly defiant Iraqis are bound to refuse as long as the sanctions remain in place. Surprisingly, Dr. Heightman agreed with me but there was no time to get into the implications of this. Heightman seemed to believe that the Republicans would steal Pat's thunder on the war question, but one can only wonder which convention he was tuning into last week. But the real brownshirts seem to be the very physical and easily excitable opponents of Buchanan, including, surprisingly, the Hagelin people. And these are the guys who want to send Transcendental Meditators to Kosovo a move, they claim, that will bring instant peace to that wartorn region.