Monday, April 24, 2006

Why nvidia screwed it in tomb raider?

What on earth is wrong with nvidia and its "THE WAY IS MEANT TO BE PLAYED" on Tomb Raider Legends




LOOK at the screenshots¡




Differences are astounding

Where did they lose it?





Sunday, April 23, 2006

A video game that seeks to make peace, not war


'PeaceMaker' simulates Israeli-Palestinian conflict in all its complexity

game creators stand in front of "PeaceMaker" screenshot
Carnegie Mellon University graduate students Eric Brown, left, and Asi Burak pose in front of a projection of a screenshot from "PeaceMaker," a game that attempts to simulate the violence and political turbulence of the Israeli-Palestinian struggle.
PITTSBURGH - A Palestinian suicide bomber blows up a bus, leaving the newly elected Israeli prime minister to puzzle over a response. A missile strike could ease security fears, or prompt more violence. A diplomatic approach might anger Israelis, leading to an assassination plot.

The complex choices facing leaders in the Middle East have long confounded political analysts and policy makers. But two graduate students at Carnegie Mellon University are hoping their video game based on the conflict will help players find solutions — and raise capital for their new company.

But will such a game attract players and investors?

Proponents of so-called serious games, an emerging genre of interactive games that tackle real-world problems, believe so. But major video game makers, while applauding such efforts, are wary of investing in them.

Asi Burak and Eric Brown, along with a team of other students, have spent more than a year building "PeaceMaker," which attempts to simulate the violence and political turbulence of the Israeli-Palestinian struggle.

Burak — a 34-year-old former Israeli intelligence officer — and Brown — a 29-year-old game developer with a degree in painting — recently formed a company, ImpactGames, to take the game to market.

Most serious games appeal to a niche market and seek to educate and train public officials, students and professionals in various fields using simulations — technology the military has used for years.

They include "Incident Commander," a government-commissioned game being designed by BreakAway Games that models terrorist attacks, school hostage crises and natural disasters. Another game, "A Force More Powerful," teaches nonviolent ways of fighting dictators, military occupiers and corrupt rulers.

Deborah Tillett, BreakAway's president, said her games have sold well, but she conceded they would have to be made less realistic to sell in larger numbers. The company's success is rarely measured by units sold, she said, but by lives or budgets saved.

screenshot from "PeaceMaker"
ETC/Carnegie Mellon
"PeaceMaker" incorporates news footage of actual events designed to make players feel connected to the real world.

The developers of "PeaceMaker" want to shatter that notion. Unlike most serious games, it aims to bridge the gap between education and entertainment and reach a mass market.

But games that emphasize education over entertainment often risk failure in the marketplace, said Steve Seabolt of Electronic Arts Inc., the world's largest video game maker.

People have believed for 15 to 20 years that there is a market for serious games, "and with the exception of `Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?' there have been precious few that have achieved commercial viability," he said, referring to the 1980s computer game that later spawned a public television show.

Some serious games focus on historical battles, but "PeaceMaker" and others deal with current events.

"Let's be realistic," Seabolt said. "Lots of people like entertainment because it takes them somewhere other than the world as it is or the life they're leading."

But Burak and Brown say the response to their game has been positive so far, even in a market hungry not only for death and destruction, but also the nonviolent themes of best sellers such as "The Sims" and "Myst."

"We had a challenge to make a peace game engaging," Burak said. "What we see out there is all of those war games. There is a reason people are making them — because they're engaging, there is a challenge, there is a conflict."

In "PeaceMaker," players choose between the role of an Israeli prime minister or a Palestinian Authority president. They make policy decisions, communicate with the international community and monitor opinion polls while coping with "black events" — bursts of violence that threaten to throw the game off course.

"PeaceMaker" incorporates news footage of actual events designed to make players feel connected to the real world. The game's objective is peace through a two-state solution, but players can also wage attacks.

It is still being developed, but a Windows-based prototype has been tested at schools and with game-industry figures. Burak and Brown hope to offer a downloadable version for PCs and Macs with $300,000 to $500,000 from people "interested not only in the investment, but the social cause," Burak said.

The project's Web site is at etc.cmu.edu/projects/peacemaker/.

Serious game developers see a bright future for "PeaceMaker" and other games that apply computer modeling techniques to social, environmental or public health problems.

Last year, the U.N. World Food Program unveiled "Food Force," which challenges players to distribute food rations on a fictitious island. The free game was downloaded more than 1 million times in its first six weeks online, according to the agency.

David Rejeski, head of the Serious Games Initiative at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C., said games like "PeaceMaker" can help players understand how difficult situations arise and how they might get out of them.

"You could do the same thing with a game ... that models some of the things that happened when the hurricane hit New Orleans," he said. "It's an incredibly complex set of interlocking actions and reactions."

It is unlikely they will become multimillion-dollar blockbusters, Rejeski said, noting that most are developed by energetic graduate students and funded by the government, foundations or altruistic investors.

"So one of the real issues is, what's the business model here? How can you actually do this and earn a decent living doing it? And that hasn't been resolved yet," he said.

Copyright 2006 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. :)

MIENTRAS ATLANTE GALOPA EN SU 90 ANIVERSARIO, LAS ÁGUILAS HUELEN A FRACASO

Martín Maret | MEDIOTIEMPO
Estadio Azteca. Sábado 22 de abril de 2006

Con solitaria anotación de Horacio Cervantes, los Potros de Hierro del Atlante se impusieron a las Águilas del América y dieron un paso fundamental rumbo a las instancias finales del Clausura 2006. América, engolosinado con el título de la Concacaf, está al borde de la eliminación.

PRIMER TIEMPO

Los boletos para la fiesta grande cotizan alto. América y Atlante saltaron al terreno de juego con plena conciencia de lo que estaba en disputa. No hay cupo para los dos en las finales de acuerdo a la estadística. En esa puja por ser los invitados, Potros y Águilas se enfrascaron en una batalla intensa, con pocos espacios en la zona de concreción. El juego no resultó espectacular pero sí movido y con la permanente sensación de que algo podía estar por suceder.

Atlante no se amilanó ante el rival de abolengo al que enfrentaba. Por el contrario, se mostró dispuesto a tomar la manija de la contienda y hasta coqueteó con el tanto de la victoria parcial mediante un disparo que fue desviado por la barrera. De no haberse presentado la impresionante reacción de Armando Navarrete, el conjunto azulgrana se hubiera ido a los vestidores con el gol de la quiniela en los bolsillos.
Los emplumados estuvieron con la pólvora mojada. Salvo algunas ocasiones producidas por el “Chaco” y Germán Villa, el cuadro azulcrema no logró explotar su potencial ofensivo. A punto de concluir la primera mitad, Claudio López tuvo la puerta abierta para abrir los cartones; sin embargo, su disparo se fue a un costado de la meta resguardada por Federico Vilar.

SEGUNDO TIEMPO

El ritmo del partido se mantuvo a lo largo de la parte complementaria. Mucho esfuerzo, notable tránsito de la pelota, pero escasa claridad para crear ocasiones de peligro. Era claro que para vulnerar las redes haría falta un destello individual, y así fue: Horacio Cervantes sacó disparo de media distancia y terminó incrustando el esférico en el ángulo derecho de Navarrete, que se estiró cuan largo es sin que con ello fuera suficiente para impedir que su valla fuera vencida.

Los ajustes desde el banquillo americanista se produjeron. Ninguno de ellos dio resultado. América dio la sensación de entregar el partido, de darse por vencido minutos antes de la confrontación. Se vio más cercana la posibilidad del segundo tanto atlantista que del primero para los de Coapa.

Las aspiraciones americanistas de clasificar a la siguiente ronda se fueron volando. El equipo azulcrema acabó escribiendo un nuevo episodio con sabor a fracaso. Salvo alguna extraña combinación de resultados en la última fecha, las Águilas quedarán fuera de la fiesta grande de nuestro futbol. Atlante, en cambio, da un paso gigantesco rumbo a la batalla por el título.

GOL

1-0 Tiro lejano de Horacio Cervantes con la pierna derecha que se incrusta en el ángulo izquierdo de la puerta americanista. (24´)

El Arbitraje

Regular de Paul Delgadillo. Germán Villa debió salir expulsado por doble amonestación.

Errores para la historia

Autor: Antonio Moreno
Viernes 21 de Abril, 2006


América ya es Campeón de CONCACAF versión 2006. Y haberle ganado al Toluca le dio eternamente otra estrella a su escudo, un trofeo mas a las vitrinas, la aparición de su nombre como ganador del año, un lugar en el Mundial de Cclubes de Japón, etcétera. ¿Y acaso en un par de años alguién se acordará del tremendo error arbitral que le regaló su primer gol?... seguro que no.

Porque resulta que al paso del tiempo, lo único que queda es precisamente el resultado final y del "cómo" se consiguió, tal vez sólo algunos tengan memoria porque las mayorías sólo verán que en los libros de récords se escribe el nombre de quienes algun día ganaron una final....sin mas detalles.

Y aunque fue muy evidente que el fuera de lugar de Kléber perjudicó a los Diablos y no haya ni punto de discusión... palo dado ni Dios lo quita, por injusto que este sea.

¿O acaso cuando se habla del título de la Selección de Inglaterra en el Mundial 66 las nuevas generaciones le quitan valor por un polémico gol de Hurst que a la fecha se sigue cuestionando si entró o no? ¿o a cada final de liga que hemos tenido se le pone un asterisco para señalar que hubo jugadas polémicas, autogoles, apretado fuera de lugar o situaciones que fueron decididas por un juez que en apariencia favoreció al que resultó Campeón?

¿Sirve de algo decir que por ejemplo en el 85 hubo un tercer partido que decidió al Campeón de México disputado en el "Corregidora" de Querétaro donde Joaquín Urrea acuchilló a los Pumas cuando en su final contra América tuvo 2 claros errores que perjudicaron directamente a los universitarios? ¿y tiene menos valor el título de Santos en el Invierno del 96 si hacemos memoria y recordamos que Jared Borgetti marcó un gol en claro fuera de lugar ante Necaxa con un error de Arturo Brizio que poco a poco la historia ha borrado?... para nada.

Imagínenese que tuviéramos que escribir al lado de cada Campeón y en cada torneo las incidencias que terminaron deicidiendo ese título.

Por ello, el coraje de Toluca, de Gallaego, de Lebrija, de Cristante y de todos sus jugadores es válido, y América, que en esta ocasión se vio beneficiado también tiene todo el derecho a celebrar como justa su nueva corona pues no fue culpa de ellos el error que terminó por ayudarlos.

Aunque se trata del equipo más polémico de México, ya se sabe que hay quienes dirán y nadie les sacará de la cabeza que fue una ayuda dirigida, que el árbitro estaba coludido, que sus colores intimidan a los jueces y muchas otras versiones que suelen escucharse cuando las Águilas ganan viéndose favorecidos por un error (no ayuda) arbitral.

¿Acaso algunos de ustedes recordarán que en la final del 2002 contra Necaxa también se dio el caso de un gol en fuera de lugar?

El caso es que nadie duda que Kléber sacó ventaja de una posición incorrecta y hay que decir que ni siquiera la televisora que es dueña del América trató de esconder las diferentes tomas que evidenciaban el fuera de lugar, pero a final de cuentas ¿tiene menos mérito el título que ganaron?... seguro que no.

Es asi como el próximo mes de diciembre en el Mundial de Clubes que avala la FIFA, los de amarillo serán nuestro representante y puede darse el caso que en un partido crucial, el error arbitral ahora los perjudique a ellos... así es el futbol.

Moraleja, en el futbol profesional, lo único que queda al paso de los años es el resultado, para bien o para mal, el viento se lleva lo demás.

Saturday, April 22, 2006

Deface a torrent site: A cool howto!

Deface a torrent site: A cool howto!

torrenteditorToday we are going to show you how to deface any torrent site with minimal effort. The designers of a lot of torrent sites blindly trust the content of a torrent file. Reason being is because both Windows and Linux dont allow tags in filenames. But what if there was a program that allows you to manipulate the internal files in a .torrent file? Well I can tell you this: When a torrentsite does not clean the output (htmlentities) then they are fucked (snatch: proper fucked). I can also tell you that almost none of the big torrent site uses clean output when it comes to displaying a torrent’s internal files (ie” mininova).

So lets get started then, here’s what you need:

* A torrent editor (or a hex editor)
* Linux (or a hex editor)
* A torrent file (or more)

Open the torrent file with the program and locate the internal files, replace their names with something like this: matrix

H@xor OwnZ y0 M0mM@

.avi and save the torrent file. Next thing to do is upload the torrent to any torrentsite that has this vulnerability and your done. Next time someone opens that page they will see your message loud and clear. Think what you could do with javascript ;)

Disclaimer: Dont use this to harm others, instead warn the poor bastards

Friday, April 21, 2006

Encuentra las diferencias

Encuentra las diferencias.


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Microsoft Natural Ergonomic Keyboard 4000 review en español

Ayer por fin me decidi a adquirir este teclado de la empresa del buen Bill.

Durante mucho tiempo estuve renuente a adquirir un teclado ergonomico porque todos los que había usado eran realmente malos,pero este tenía algo quer me inspiro confianza ( o alo mejor fue una compra de impulso).

El teclado es gigantesco, de hecho voy a tener que hacer algunos cambios en mi "workspace", ssi tienes unos de sos muebles que cuentan con una repisa corrediza para el teclado, tal vez quieras esperar un poco en este review.


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Esteticamente a mi me tiene convencido, es un teclado negro con muchos aspectos interesantes y realmente no es tan dificil aprender a escribir en el, despues de unas dos horas (unos cuantos emails, una que otra entrada en el blog, y uno que otro post en el fore, pues ya más o menos me he hecho con el, debo aclara que yo todavía escribo casí, casí con dos dedos , pero más o menos ya tengo presente donde se encuentran las teclas y en este teclado el layout no varía mucho, algunas teclas son más grandes que otras (como se aprecia en la imagen de arriba) y es factible que las manos casí no se alejen de las teclas, que son bastante suaves y no hacen escandalo, la tecla de espacio es un poco más rigida, lo que es bueno para evitar presionarla por error.

Photobucket - Video and Image Hosting
(Mis manos no son nada pequeñas y aún así es comodo, imaginense para los de manos diminutas)
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Cualquier error tipografico se lo achacaremos a la novedad de este teclado.

La tecla return es la que se ha modificado más de mi anterior teclado, ahora es un muy pequeña.

El descanso de las muñecas es muy comodo, es de un material muy fresco, mi primo, comentaba ¿Es piel?, obviamente no es piel, pero mejor aún, esa se parte y este recubrimiento parece estar destinado a perdurar.

Viene acompañado (como buen producto de Microsoft) con su software, llamado intellitype Pro, que permite asignar las 5 favoritos, para iniciar, aplicaciones, paginas, documentos, macros, etc, sólo hay que indicarle la ruta y al presionarlo inicia el explorador o la corre, en la parte inferior vienen los leds indicadores de los estados del capsclok,numlock,scrlk y dos teclas que son los atajos para visitar documentos,adelante atras, todo en un clarisímo español.

Las fotos que subire más tarde describiran mejor la cuestión del espacio, se le puden quitar las bases para que no ocupe tanto espacio,pero realmente no tendría caso comprar este teclado que anda en alrededor de $500 pesos mexicanos para trabajarlo como uno convencional y provocar la fatiga que precisamente trata de evitar.
De las teclas multimedia no hay gran cosa que agregar, son 4, dos para el control de volumen y otra poara silenciarlo, con una que es pausa/play.

El software permite que se reasignen si es necesario o deseable.

El teclado es compatible con mac y me imagino con muchas distros de LINUX, lo probare con Ubuntu y actualizarée, aunque eso tal vez sea en un futuro no tan cercano.

Así que en conclusión, no es barato, es muy comodo, muy funcional, esteticamente es impresionante, su slider esta a punto de convertirse en una necesidad sobre todo para los que usan el mouse cuando es muy necesario y prefieren usar atajos de teclado.


The Worst President in History?

George W. Bush's presidency appears headed for colossal historical disgrace. Barring a cataclysmic event on the order of the terrorist attacks of September 11th, after which the public might rally around the White House once again, there seems to be little the administration can do to avoid being ranked on the lowest tier of U.S. presidents. And that may be the best-case scenario. Many historians are now wondering whether Bush, in fact, will be remembered as the very worst president in all of American history.

From time to time, after hours, I kick back with my colleagues at Princeton to argue idly about which president really was the worst of them all. For years, these perennial debates have largely focused on the same handful of chief executives whom national polls of historians, from across the ideological and political spectrum, routinely cite as the bottom of the presidential barrel. Was the lousiest James Buchanan, who, confronted with Southern secession in 1860, dithered to a degree that, as his most recent biographer has said, probably amounted to disloyalty -- and who handed to his successor, Abraham Lincoln, a nation already torn asunder? Was it Lincoln's successor, Andrew Johnson, who actively sided with former Confederates and undermined Reconstruction? What about the amiably incompetent Warren G. Harding, whose administration was fabulously corrupt? Or, though he has his defenders, Herbert Hoover, who tried some reforms but remained imprisoned in his own outmoded individualist ethic and collapsed under the weight of the stock-market crash of 1929 and the Depression's onset? The younger historians always put in a word for Richard M. Nixon, the only American president forced to resign from office.

Now, though, George W. Bush is in serious contention for the title of worst ever. In early 2004, an informal survey of 415 historians conducted by the nonpartisan History News Network found that eighty-one percent considered the Bush administration a "failure." Among those who called Bush a success, many gave the president high marks only for his ability to mobilize public support and get Congress to go along with what one historian called the administration's "pursuit of disastrous policies." In fact, roughly one in ten of those who called Bush a success was being facetious, rating him only as the best president since Bill Clinton -- a category in which Bush is the only contestant.

The lopsided decision of historians should give everyone pause. Contrary to popular stereotypes, historians are generally a cautious bunch. We assess the past from widely divergent points of view and are deeply concerned about being viewed as fair and accurate by our colleagues. When we make historical judgments, we are acting not as voters or even pundits, but as scholars who must evaluate all the evidence, good, bad or indifferent. Separate surveys, conducted by those perceived as conservatives as well as liberals, show remarkable unanimity about who the best and worst presidents have been.

Historians do tend, as a group, to be far more liberal than the citizenry as a whole -- a fact the president's admirers have seized on to dismiss the poll results as transparently biased. One pro-Bush historian said the survey revealed more about "the current crop of history professors" than about Bush or about Bush's eventual standing. But if historians were simply motivated by a strong collective liberal bias, they might be expected to call Bush the worst president since his father, or Ronald Reagan, or Nixon. Instead, more than half of those polled -- and nearly three-fourths of those who gave Bush a negative rating -- reached back before Nixon to find a president they considered as miserable as Bush. The presidents most commonly linked with Bush included Hoover, Andrew Johnson and Buchanan. Twelve percent of the historians polled -- nearly as many as those who rated Bush a success -- flatly called Bush the worst president in American history. And these figures were gathered before the debacles over Hurricane Katrina, Bush's role in the Valerie Plame leak affair and the deterioration of the situation in Iraq. Were the historians polled today, that figure would certainly be higher.

Even worse for the president, the general public, having once given Bush the highest approval ratings ever recorded, now appears to be coming around to the dismal view held by most historians. To be sure, the president retains a considerable base of supporters who believe in and adore him, and who reject all criticism with a mixture of disbelief and fierce contempt -- about one-third of the electorate. (When the columnist Richard Reeves publicized the historians' poll last year and suggested it might have merit, he drew thousands of abusive replies that called him an idiot and that praised Bush as, in one writer's words, "a Christian who actually acts on his deeply held beliefs.") Yet the ranks of the true believers have thinned dramatically. A majority of voters in forty-three states now disapprove of Bush's handling of his job. Since the commencement of reliable polling in the 1940s, only one twice-elected president has seen his ratings fall as low as Bush's in his second term: Richard Nixon, during the months preceding his resignation in 1974. No two-term president since polling began has fallen from such a height of popularity as Bush's (in the neighborhood of ninety percent, during the patriotic upswell following the 2001 attacks) to such a low (now in the midthirties). No president, including Harry Truman (whose ratings sometimes dipped below Nixonian levels), has experienced such a virtually unrelieved decline as Bush has since his high point. Apart from sharp but temporary upticks that followed the commencement of the Iraq war and the capture of Saddam Hussein, and a recovery during the weeks just before and after his re-election, the Bush trend has been a profile in fairly steady disillusionment.

* * * *

How does any president's reputation sink so low? The reasons are best understood as the reverse of those that produce presidential greatness. In almost every survey of historians dating back to the 1940s, three presidents have emerged as supreme successes: George Washington, Abraham Lincoln and Franklin D. Roosevelt. These were the men who guided the nation through what historians consider its greatest crises: the founding era after the ratification of the Constitution, the Civil War, and the Great Depression and Second World War. Presented with arduous, at times seemingly impossible circumstances, they rallied the nation, governed brilliantly and left the republic more secure than when they entered office.

Calamitous presidents, faced with enormous difficulties -- Buchanan, Andrew Johnson, Hoover and now Bush -- have divided the nation, governed erratically and left the nation worse off. In each case, different factors contributed to the failure: disastrous domestic policies, foreign-policy blunders and military setbacks, executive misconduct, crises of credibility and public trust. Bush, however, is one of the rarities in presidential history: He has not only stumbled badly in every one of these key areas, he has also displayed a weakness common among the greatest presidential failures -- an unswerving adherence to a simplistic ideology that abjures deviation from dogma as heresy, thus preventing any pragmatic adjustment to changing realities. Repeatedly, Bush has undone himself, a failing revealed in each major area of presidential performance.

* * * *

THE CREDIBILITY GAP

No previous president appears to have squandered the public's trust more than Bush has. In the 1840s, President James Polk gained a reputation for deviousness over his alleged manufacturing of the war with Mexico and his supposedly covert pro-slavery views. Abraham Lincoln, then an Illinois congressman, virtually labeled Polk a liar when he called him, from the floor of the House, "a bewildered, confounded and miserably perplexed man" and denounced the war as "from beginning to end, the sheerest deception." But the swift American victory in the war, Polk's decision to stick by his pledge to serve only one term and his sudden death shortly after leaving office spared him the ignominy over slavery that befell his successors in the 1850s. With more than two years to go in Bush's second term and no swift victory in sight, Bush's reputation will probably have no such reprieve.

The problems besetting Bush are of a more modern kind than Polk's, suited to the television age -- a crisis both in confidence and credibility. In 1965, Lyndon Johnson's Vietnam travails gave birth to the phrase "credibility gap," meaning the distance between a president's professions and the public's perceptions of reality. It took more than two years for Johnson's disapproval rating in the Gallup Poll to reach fifty-two percent in March 1968 -- a figure Bush long ago surpassed, but that was sufficient to persuade the proud LBJ not to seek re-election. Yet recently, just short of three years after Bush buoyantly declared "mission accomplished" in Iraq, his disapproval ratings have been running considerably higher than Johnson's, at about sixty percent. More than half the country now considers Bush dishonest and untrustworthy, and a decisive plurality consider him less trustworthy than his predecessor, Bill Clinton -- a figure still attacked by conservative zealots as "Slick Willie."

Previous modern presidents, including Truman, Reagan and Clinton, managed to reverse plummeting ratings and regain the public's trust by shifting attention away from political and policy setbacks, and by overhauling the White House's inner circles. But Bush's publicly expressed view that he has made no major mistakes, coupled with what even the conservative commentator William F. Buckley Jr. calls his "high-flown pronouncements" about failed policies, seems to foreclose the first option. Upping the ante in the Middle East and bombing Iranian nuclear sites, a strategy reportedly favored by some in the White House, could distract the public and gain Bush immediate political capital in advance of the 2006 midterm elections -- but in the long term might severely worsen the already dire situation in Iraq, especially among Shiite Muslims linked to the Iranians. And given Bush's ardent attachment to loyal aides, no matter how discredited, a major personnel shake-up is improbable, short of indictments. Replacing Andrew Card with Joshua Bolten as chief of staff -- a move announced by the president in March in a tone that sounded more like defiance than contrition -- represents a rededication to current policies and personnel, not a serious change. (Card, an old Bush family retainer, was widely considered more moderate than most of the men around the president and had little involvement in policy-making.) The power of Vice President Dick Cheney, meanwhile, remains uncurbed. Were Cheney to announce he is stepping down due to health problems, normally a polite pretext for a political removal, one can be reasonably certain it would be because Cheney actually did have grave health problems.

* * * *

BUSH AT WAR

Until the twentieth century, American presidents managed foreign wars well -- including those presidents who prosecuted unpopular wars. James Madison had no support from Federalist New England at the outset of the War of 1812, and the discontent grew amid mounting military setbacks in 1813. But Federalist political overreaching, combined with a reversal of America's military fortunes and the negotiation of a peace with Britain, made Madison something of a hero again and ushered in a brief so-called Era of Good Feelings in which his Jeffersonian Republican Party coalition ruled virtually unopposed. The Mexican War under Polk was even more unpopular, but its quick and victorious conclusion redounded to Polk's favor -- much as the rapid American victory in the Spanish-American War helped William McKinley overcome anti-imperialist dissent.

The twentieth century was crueler to wartime presidents. After winning re-election in 1916 with the slogan "He Kept Us Out of War," Woodrow Wilson oversaw American entry into the First World War. Yet while the doughboys returned home triumphant, Wilson's idealistic and politically disastrous campaign for American entry into the League of Nations presaged a resurgence of the opposition Republican Party along with a redoubling of American isolationism that lasted until Pearl Harbor.

Bush has more in common with post-1945 Democratic presidents Truman and Johnson, who both became bogged down in overseas military conflicts with no end, let alone victory, in sight. But Bush has become bogged down in a singularly crippling way. On September 10th, 2001, he held among the lowest ratings of any modern president for that point in a first term. (Only Gerald Ford, his popularity reeling after his pardon of Nixon, had comparable numbers.) The attacks the following day transformed Bush's presidency, giving him an extraordinary opportunity to achieve greatness. Some of the early signs were encouraging. Bush's simple, unflinching eloquence and his quick toppling of the Taliban government in Afghanistan rallied the nation. Yet even then, Bush wasted his chance by quickly choosing partisanship over leadership.

No other president -- Lincoln in the Civil War, FDR in World War II, John F. Kennedy at critical moments of the Cold War -- faced with such a monumental set of military and political circumstances failed to embrace the opposing political party to help wage a truly national struggle. But Bush shut out and even demonized the Democrats. Top military advisers and even members of the president's own Cabinet who expressed any reservations or criticisms of his policies -- including retired Marine Corps Gen. Anthony Zinni and former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill -- suffered either dismissal, smear attacks from the president's supporters or investigations into their alleged breaches of national security. The wise men who counseled Bush's father, including James Baker and Brent Scowcroft, found their entreaties brusquely ignored by his son. When asked if he ever sought advice from the elder Bush, the president responded, "There is a higher Father that I appeal to."

All the while, Bush and the most powerful figures in the administration, Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, were planting the seeds for the crises to come by diverting the struggle against Al Qaeda toward an all-out effort to topple their pre-existing target, Saddam Hussein. In a deliberate political decision, the administration stampeded the Congress and a traumatized citizenry into the Iraq invasion on the basis of what has now been demonstrated to be tendentious and perhaps fabricated evidence of an imminent Iraqi threat to American security, one that the White House suggested included nuclear weapons. Instead of emphasizing any political, diplomatic or humanitarian aspects of a war on Iraq -- an appeal that would have sounded too "sensitive," as Cheney once sneered -- the administration built a "Bush Doctrine" of unprovoked, preventive warfare, based on speculative threats and embracing principles previously abjured by every previous generation of U.S. foreign policy-makers, even at the height of the Cold War. The president did so with premises founded, in the case of Iraq, on wishful thinking. He did so while proclaiming an expansive Wilsonian rhetoric of making the world safe for democracy -- yet discarding the multilateralism and systems of international law (including the Geneva Conventions) that emanated from Wilson's idealism. He did so while dismissing intelligence that an American invasion could spark a long and bloody civil war among Iraq's fierce religious and ethnic rivals, reports that have since proved true. And he did so after repeated warnings by military officials such as Gen. Eric Shinseki that pacifying postwar Iraq would require hundreds of thousands of American troops -- accurate estimates that Paul Wolfowitz and other Bush policy gurus ridiculed as "wildly off the mark."

When William F. Buckley, the man whom many credit as the founder of the modern conservative movement, writes categorically, as he did in February, that "one can't doubt that the American objective in Iraq has failed," then something terrible has happened. Even as a brash young iconoclast, Buckley always took the long view. The Bush White House seems incapable of doing so, except insofar as a tiny trusted circle around the president constantly reassures him that he is a messianic liberator and profound freedom fighter, on a par with FDR and Lincoln, and that history will vindicate his every act and utterance.

* * * *

BUSH AT HOME

Bush came to office in 2001 pledging to govern as a "compassionate conservative," more moderate on domestic policy than the dominant right wing of his party. The pledge proved hollow, as Bush tacked immediately to the hard right. Previous presidents and their parties have suffered when their actions have belied their campaign promises. Lyndon Johnson is the most conspicuous recent example, having declared in his 1964 run against the hawkish Republican Barry Goldwater that "we are not about to send American boys nine or ten thousand miles away from home to do what Asian boys ought to be doing for themselves." But no president has surpassed Bush in departing so thoroughly from his original campaign persona.

The heart of Bush's domestic policy has turned out to be nothing more than a series of massively regressive tax cuts -- a return, with a vengeance, to the discredited Reagan-era supply-side faith that Bush's father once ridiculed as "voodoo economics." Bush crowed in triumph in February 2004, "We cut taxes, which basically meant people had more money in their pocket." The claim is bogus for the majority of Americans, as are claims that tax cuts have led to impressive new private investment and job growth. While wiping out the solid Clinton-era federal surplus and raising federal deficits to staggering record levels, Bush's tax policies have necessitated hikes in federal fees, state and local taxes, and co-payment charges to needy veterans and families who rely on Medicaid, along with cuts in loan programs to small businesses and college students, and in a wide range of state services. The lion's share of benefits from the tax cuts has gone to the very richest Americans, while new business investment has increased at a historically sluggish rate since the peak of the last business cycle five years ago. Private-sector job growth since 2001 has been anemic compared to the Bush administration's original forecasts and is chiefly attributable not to the tax cuts but to increased federal spending, especially on defense. Real wages for middle-income Americans have been dropping since the end of 2003: Last year, on average, nominal wages grew by only 2.4 percent, a meager gain that was completely erased by an average inflation rate of 3.4 percent.

The monster deficits, caused by increased federal spending combined with the reduction of revenue resulting from the tax cuts, have also placed Bush's administration in a historic class of its own with respect to government borrowing. According to the Treasury Department, the forty-two presidents who held office between 1789 and 2000 borrowed a combined total of $1.01 trillion from foreign governments and financial institutions. But between 2001 and 2005 alone, the Bush White House borrowed $1.05 trillion, more than all of the previous presidencies combined. Having inherited the largest federal surplus in American history in 2001, he has turned it into the largest deficit ever -- with an even higher deficit, $423 billion, forecast for fiscal year 2006. Yet Bush -- sounding much like Herbert Hoover in 1930 predicting that "prosperity is just around the corner" -- insists that he will cut federal deficits in half by 2009, and that the best way to guarantee this would be to make permanent his tax cuts, which helped cause the deficit in the first place!

The rest of what remains of Bush's skimpy domestic agenda is either failed or failing -- a record unmatched since the presidency of Herbert Hoover. The No Child Left Behind educational-reform act has proved so unwieldy, draconian and poorly funded that several states -- including Utah, one of Bush's last remaining political strongholds -- have fought to opt out of it entirely. White House proposals for immigration reform and a guest-worker program have succeeded mainly in dividing pro-business Republicans (who want more low-wage immigrant workers) from paleo-conservatives fearful that hordes of Spanish-speaking newcomers will destroy American culture. The paleos' call for tougher anti-immigrant laws -- a return to the punitive spirit of exclusion that led to the notorious Immigration Act of 1924 that shut the door to immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe -- has in turn deeply alienated Hispanic voters from the Republican Party, badly undermining the GOP's hopes of using them to build a permanent national electoral majority. The recent pro-immigrant demonstrations, which drew millions of marchers nationwide, indicate how costly the Republican divide may prove.

The one noncorporate constituency to which Bush has consistently deferred is the Christian right, both in his selections for the federal bench and in his implications that he bases his policies on premillennialist, prophetic Christian doctrine. Previous presidents have regularly invoked the Almighty. McKinley is supposed to have fallen to his knees, seeking divine guidance about whether to take control of the Philippines in 1898, although the story may be apocryphal. But no president before Bush has allowed the press to disclose, through a close friend, his startling belief that he was ordained by God to lead the country. The White House's sectarian positions -- over stem-cell research, the teaching of pseudoscientific "intelligent design," global population control, the Terri Schiavo spectacle and more -- have led some to conclude that Bush has promoted the transformation of the GOP into what former Republican strategist Kevin Phillips calls "the first religious party in U.S. history."

Bush's faith-based conception of his mission, which stands above and beyond reasoned inquiry, jibes well with his administration's pro-business dogma on global warming and other urgent environmental issues. While forcing federally funded agencies to remove from their Web sites scientific information about reproductive health and the effectiveness of condoms in combating HIV/AIDS, and while peremptorily overruling staff scientists at the Food and Drug Administration on making emergency contraception available over the counter, Bush officials have censored and suppressed research findings they don't like by the Environmental Protection Agency, the Fish and Wildlife Service and the Department of Agriculture. Far from being the conservative he said he was, Bush has blazed a radical new path as the first American president in history who is outwardly hostile to science -- dedicated, as a distinguished, bipartisan panel of educators and scientists (including forty-nine Nobel laureates) has declared, to "the distortion of scientific knowledge for partisan political ends."

The Bush White House's indifference to domestic problems and science alike culminated in the catastrophic responses to Hurricane Katrina. Scientists had long warned that global warming was intensifying hurricanes, but Bush ignored them -- much as he and his administration sloughed off warnings from the director of the National Hurricane Center before Katrina hit. Reorganized under the Department of Homeland Security, the once efficient Federal Emergency Management Agency turned out, under Bush, to have become a nest of cronyism and incompetence. During the months immediately after the storm, Bush traveled to New Orleans eight times to promise massive rebuilding aid from the federal government. On March 30th, however, Bush's Gulf Coast recovery coordinator admitted that it could take as long as twenty-five years for the city to recover.

Karl Rove has sometimes likened Bush to the imposing, no-nonsense President Andrew Jackson. Yet Jackson took measures to prevent those he called "the rich and powerful" from bending "the acts of government to their selfish purposes." Jackson also gained eternal renown by saving New Orleans from British invasion against terrible odds. Generations of Americans sang of Jackson's famous victory. In 1959, Johnny Horton's version of "The Battle of New Orleans" won the Grammy for best country & western performance. If anyone sings about George W. Bush and New Orleans, it will be a blues number.

* * * *

PRESIDENTIAL MISCONDUCT

Virtually every presidential administration dating back to George Washington's has faced charges of misconduct and threats of impeachment against the president or his civil officers. The alleged offenses have usually involved matters of personal misbehavior and corruption, notably the payoff scandals that plagued Cabinet officials who served presidents Harding and Ulysses S. Grant. But the charges have also included alleged usurpation of power by the president and serious criminal conduct that threatens constitutional government and the rule of law -- most notoriously, the charges that led to the impeachments of Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton, and to Richard Nixon's resignation.

Historians remain divided over the actual grievousness of many of these allegations and crimes. Scholars reasonably describe the graft and corruption around the Grant administration, for example, as gargantuan, including a kickback scandal that led to the resignation of Grant's secretary of war under the shadow of impeachment. Yet the scandals produced no indictments of Cabinet secretaries and only one of a White House aide, who was acquitted. By contrast, the most scandal-ridden administration in the modern era, apart from Nixon's, was Ronald Reagan's, now widely remembered through a haze of nostalgia as a paragon of virtue. A total of twenty-nine Reagan officials, including White House national security adviser Robert McFarlane and deputy chief of staff Michael Deaver, were convicted on charges stemming from the Iran-Contra affair, illegal lobbying and a looting scandal inside the Department of Housing and Urban Development. Three Cabinet officers -- HUD Secretary Samuel Pierce, Attorney General Edwin Meese and Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger -- left their posts under clouds of scandal. In contrast, not a single official in the Clinton administration was even indicted over his or her White House duties, despite repeated high-profile investigations and a successful, highly partisan impeachment drive.

The full report, of course, has yet to come on the Bush administration. Because Bush, unlike Reagan or Clinton, enjoys a fiercely partisan and loyal majority in Congress, his administration has been spared scrutiny. Yet that mighty advantage has not prevented the indictment of Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, on charges stemming from an alleged major security breach in the Valerie Plame matter. (The last White House official of comparable standing to be indicted while still in office was Grant's personal secretary, in 1875.) It has not headed off the unprecedented scandal involving Larry Franklin, a high-ranking Defense Department official, who has pleaded guilty to divulging classified information to a foreign power while working at the Pentagon -- a crime against national security. It has not forestalled the arrest and indictment of Bush's top federal procurement official, David Safavian, and the continuing investigations into Safavian's intrigues with the disgraced Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff, recently sentenced to nearly six years in prison -- investigations in which some prominent Republicans, including former Christian Coalition executive director Ralph Reed (and current GOP aspirant for lieutenant governor of Georgia) have already been implicated, and could well produce the largest congressional corruption scandal in American history. It has not dispelled the cloud of possible indictment that hangs over others of Bush's closest advisers.

History may ultimately hold Bush in the greatest contempt for expanding the powers of the presidency beyond the limits laid down by the U.S. Constitution. There has always been a tension over the constitutional roles of the three branches of the federal government. The Framers intended as much, as part of the system of checks and balances they expected would minimize tyranny. When Andrew Jackson took drastic measures against the nation's banking system, the Whig Senate censured him for conduct "dangerous to the liberties of the people." During the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln's emergency decisions to suspend habeas corpus while Congress was out of session in 1861 and 1862 has led some Americans, to this day, to regard him as a despot. Richard Nixon's conduct of the war in Southeast Asia and his covert domestic-surveillance programs prompted Congress to pass new statutes regulating executive power.

By contrast, the Bush administration -- in seeking to restore what Cheney, a Nixon administration veteran, has called "the legitimate authority of the presidency" -- threatens to overturn the Framers' healthy tension in favor of presidential absolutism. Armed with legal findings by his attorney general (and personal lawyer) Alberto Gonzales, the Bush White House has declared that the president's powers as commander in chief in wartime are limitless. No previous wartime president has come close to making so grandiose a claim. More specifically, this administration has asserted that the president is perfectly free to violate federal laws on such matters as domestic surveillance and the torture of detainees. When Congress has passed legislation to limit those assertions, Bush has resorted to issuing constitutionally dubious "signing statements," which declare, by fiat, how he will interpret and execute the law in question, even when that interpretation flagrantly violates the will of Congress. Earlier presidents, including Jackson, raised hackles by offering their own view of the Constitution in order to justify vetoing congressional acts. Bush doesn't bother with that: He signs the legislation (eliminating any risk that Congress will overturn a veto), and then governs how he pleases -- using the signing statements as if they were line-item vetoes. In those instances when Bush's violations of federal law have come to light, as over domestic surveillance, the White House has devised a novel solution: Stonewall any investigation into the violations and bid a compliant Congress simply to rewrite the laws.

Bush's alarmingly aberrant take on the Constitution is ironic. One need go back in the record less than a decade to find prominent Republicans railing against far more minor presidential legal infractions as precursors to all-out totalitarianism. "I will have no part in the creation of a constitutional double-standard to benefit the president," Sen. Bill Frist declared of Bill Clinton's efforts to conceal an illicit sexual liaison. "No man is above the law, and no man is below the law -- that's the principle that we all hold very dear in this country," Rep. Tom DeLay asserted. "The rule of law protects you and it protects me from the midnight fire on our roof or the 3 a.m. knock on our door," warned Rep. Henry Hyde, one of Clinton's chief accusers. In the face of Bush's more definitive dismissal of federal law, the silence from these quarters is deafening.

The president's defenders stoutly contend that war-time conditions fully justify Bush's actions. And as Lincoln showed during the Civil War, there may be times of military emergency where the executive believes it imperative to take immediate, highly irregular, even unconstitutional steps. "I felt that measures, otherwise unconstitutional, might become lawful," Lincoln wrote in 1864, "by becoming indispensable to the preservation of the Constitution, through the preservation of the nation." Bush seems to think that, since 9/11, he has been placed, by the grace of God, in the same kind of situation Lincoln faced. But Lincoln, under pressure of daily combat on American soil against fellow Americans, did not operate in secret, as Bush has. He did not claim, as Bush has, that his emergency actions were wholly regular and constitutional as well as necessary; Lincoln sought and received Congressional authorization for his suspension of habeas corpus in 1863. Nor did Lincoln act under the amorphous cover of a "war on terror" -- a war against a tactic, not a specific nation or political entity, which could last as long as any president deems the tactic a threat to national security. Lincoln's exceptional measures were intended to survive only as long as the Confederacy was in rebellion. Bush's could be extended indefinitely, as the president sees fit, permanently endangering rights and liberties guaranteed by the Constitution to the citizenry.

* * * *

Much as Bush still enjoys support from those who believe he can do no wrong, he now suffers opposition from liberals who believe he can do no right. Many of these liberals are in the awkward position of having supported Bush in the past, while offering little coherent as an alternative to Bush's policies now. Yet it is difficult to see how this will benefit Bush's reputation in history.

The president came to office calling himself "a uniter, not a divider" and promising to soften the acrimonious tone in Washington. He has had two enormous opportunities to fulfill those pledges: first, in the noisy aftermath of his controversial election in 2000, and, even more, after the attacks of September 11th, when the nation pulled behind him as it has supported no other president in living memory. Yet under both sets of historically unprecedented circumstances, Bush has chosen to act in ways that have left the country less united and more divided, less conciliatory and more acrimonious -- much like James Buchanan, Andrew Johnson and Herbert Hoover before him. And, like those three predecessors, Bush has done so in the service of a rigid ideology that permits no deviation and refuses to adjust to changing realities. Buchanan failed the test of Southern secession, Johnson failed in the face of Reconstruction, and Hoover failed in the face of the Great Depression. Bush has failed to confront his own failures in both domestic and international affairs, above all in his ill-conceived responses to radical Islamic terrorism. Having confused steely resolve with what Ralph Waldo Emerson called "a foolish consistency . . . adored by little statesmen," Bush has become entangled in tragedies of his own making, compounding those visited upon the country by outside forces.

No historian can responsibly predict the future with absolute certainty. There are too many imponderables still to come in the two and a half years left in Bush's presidency to know exactly how it will look in 2009, let alone in 2059. There have been presidents -- Harry Truman was one -- who have left office in seeming disgrace, only to rebound in the estimates of later scholars. But so far the facts are not shaping up propitiously for George W. Bush. He still does his best to deny it. Having waved away the lessons of history in the making of his decisions, the present-minded Bush doesn't seem to be concerned about his place in history. "History. We won't know," he told the journalist Bob Woodward in 2003. "We'll all be dead."

Another president once explained that the judgments of history cannot be defied or dismissed, even by a president. "Fellow citizens, we cannot escape history," said Abraham Lincoln. "We of this Congress and this administration, will be remembered in spite of ourselves. No personal significance, or insignificance, can spare one or another of us. The fiery trial through which we pass, will light us down, in honor or dishonor, to the latest generation."

SEAN WILENTZ

Posted Apr 21, 2006 12:34 PM