The missing al Qaeda deck

Here's what I don't get.

It was important to the Bush administration for us to track down and capture over fifty Iraqis, so someone came up with a clever device to keep track of them, the Iraqi Most Wanted Deck of cards.

This was such a catchy idea that others have come up with their own decks to enumerate their perceived enemies (and make some bucks). It wasn't long before I was receiving a new spam variant advertising copies of the Iraqi deck. As a meme, it was a raging success.

Now.

Is there any other group you can think of that we're looking high and low for? Which has at least fifty-two members? And who, I would argue, is rather more important to track down than Hussein and his staff?

Here's a hint: Bin Laden would be the Ace of Spades.

Where's the al Qaeda Most Wanted Deck? Why isn't there a public focus on tracking them down? Do we not know at least fifty important guys who we can name publicly? Heck, I'm even in favor of having some cards be "important bad guys already captured" if it'll help.

Discussion question: Why do you think it's important to the administration to drum up public "capture-bad-Iraqis" support but not for "capture-al-Qaeda"? Or, why does it make more military sense to have the one but not the other?

Let's assume that it's not sheer forgetfulness (a la "oops, we forgot to budget funds for Afghanistan reconstruction") and that it's not simply that they hope the American public will forget about the people who have repeatedly succeeded in attacking us in favor of the people who were sitting ducks for us. That's too easy.  

 Some fine sites

Sites worth your while: Here are some good reads I've picked up over the last long while:

• Calpundit aka Kevin Drum, a politics-watching weblogger who doesn't have his mind made up about every issue and has actual dialogues with people across the spectrum, giving credit to good arguments wherever it's due. Rare and cool.
• Snarky smart guy John Scalzi has shifted from occasional essays to the weblog format, and it's a winner.
• Political Wire, ABC's The Note and The Scrum for canvassing the news of the day; three clipping services for the discriminating political junkie.
• ...and some sites which are, let's say, no more unfair or unbalanced than Fox News and the Instanista: Atrios' Eschaton, This Modern World, Daily Kos.

Finally, I still highly recommend some old faves: rc3.org, La Di Da, Backup Brain, Ghost in the Machine and of course Medley.  

 Bush Cheney 2004 headquarters

A jobs program in Arlington: Preparing to Raise the Curtain on 2004 [NY Times]

There are still wires dangling from the ceiling, a sea of empty cubicles and no television sets. But the sprawling, just-opened headquarters of the Bush-Cheney 2004 re-election campaign, in a characterless office park just three and a half miles from the White House in suburban Virginia,

Hey, maybe I can visit. Except they don't give the actual address, of course.

has all the expensive self-assurance of a political juggernaut that is expecting to vacuum up a record $170 million in campaign contributions and leave the Democrats in its wake.

Wait, the number I've been reading for weeks is $200 million. Is the $170 million just an artificial lowering of expectations, or are they not doing as well as originally expected?

The headquarters is also, it must be noted, no longer in the heartland of Austin, Tex., the site of the Bush-Cheney headquarters in 2000, but firmly rooted inside the Beltway. President Bush may complain about all those politicians spending the people's money in Washington, but he lives here now, and so do his top advisers.

"We're not in Washington, we're in Arlington," protested Ken Mehlman, the campaign manager, ignoring the fabulous view from his eighth-floor office of the Lincoln and Jefferson Memorials and the Washington Monument.

Nice inside-the-beltway parsing skills, Ken. Why is it so horrible to be seen to be in Washington when you're in the ruling party, anyway? Phony. Also, another location clue: 8th floor.

...Right now the campaign is focused largely on raising money, but it is also selecting state campaign chairmen. It appears to be closely and effortlessly in touch with the White House, 15 minutes and four Washington Metro stops away.

And another clue.

I wonder if they take walk-in visitors; I'm sure it would be a fascinating place to observe.     1 comment(s)  

I was an independent voter until this morning when I witnessed the Democratic Liberal Press circling the White House Press Conference like sharks. I could not believe my eyes or ears. Because of Terry McCauliff at the DNC and his false accusations regarding our President, I now declare myself and my mother for the re-election of President Bush and Vice-President Cheney. Stephen L. Collins Stafford VA
      ...posted by Stephen L. Collins on February 11, 2004 12:18 AM

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 Hierarchical data in Relational DB

Interesting: an unintuitive approach to efficiently Storing Hierarchical Data in a [Relational] Database [sitepoint via dive into mark]. Keep around for later (for, say, storing relations of sentences to paragraph to speakers).