A certain DC baseblogger is also an Atlanta Braves fan, and was devastated by last night’s collapse against the Houston Astros.

Which brings up an interesting theological question: As a sports fan, would you rather have (a) a team like the Florida Marlins, which craps out 8 seasons out of 10, but then wins multiple World Series championships, or (b) a team like the Braves, which almost never wins the Series, but is always right in the thick of the playoffs?

Being from Philadelphia and not having any experience with either scenario, it seems to me that I’d much rather have the Braves. Year in and year out, you get seven months of excitement and good feeling. Watching SportsCenter becomes a joy, not a chore. You get to hold your head up high until the October collapse, which is painful, but short, and immediately followed by the salve of the rest of the playoffs.

I’m interested in what other people think about this, because the answers, I suspect, are psychologically revealing. I says a lot, for instance, about how a person defines the concept of “winning.”

President Bush, I suspect, would prefer the Marlins. And I bet John Kerry would prefer the Braves.

While some polls show John Kerry pulling away from George W. Bush in New Jersey, others, like the Quinnipiac poll, show the president only three points behind. And not even the state’s Democratic co-chair is predicting Kerry to win by as large a margin as Al Gore or Bill Clinton did (16 points and 18 points respectively). So why is Bush so close in the Garden State? Some say it is 9/11 and after. Others point to an accumulation of political scandals. It’s probably a combination of both. My recent article in The Weekly Standard breaks it down.

I should have noted last night that my round-by-round scorecard for the debate is up.

Well, not satire, exactly. But a funny joke, passed on from the interweb:

How many Bush officials does it take to change a lightbulb?

None. “There’s nothing wrong with that light bulb. It has served us honorably. When you say it’s burned out, you’re giving encouragement to the forces of darkness. Once we install a light bulb, we never, ever change it. Real men don’t need artificial light.”

I’m a sucker for clever political satire and this t-shirt is the funniest send-up I’ve seen in a while. (Advance thanks to anyone who wants to send one of them to me at the offices of The Weekly Standard. I take Large.)

Another Harry Potter character is going to die? My money’s on Tonks.

Or Percy.

Just asking: If Trent Lott had to give up his leadership position because he said kind words about Strom Thurmond, would a Republican politician who called a Democratic rival a “faggot” be allowed to get off with a simple apology? I didn’t think so. Where is the Human Rights Campaign when you need them?

But then again, a Republican president who was credibly charged with rape, sexual assault, and sexual harrassment wouldn’t be given a pass by NOW, either.

The suspicion is that John Kerry will make reference to the Duelfer report no fewer than seven times during the debate tonight. Kerry will most likely try to use Duelfer as a hammer to beat home the theme that Bush is fundamentally dishonest and can’t be trusted because he lies. (As opposed to Kerry, whom Bush insists can’t be distrusted because he flip-flops.)

I suspect that this tactic will be spectacularly effective. It shouldn’t be. As Mickey Kaus notes today, “If a man says he has a gun, acts like he has a gun, and convinces everyone around him he has a gun, and starts waving it around and behaving recklessly, the police are justified in shooting him (even if it turns out later he just had a black bar of soap). Similarly, according to the Duelfer report, Saddam seems to have intentionally convinced other countries, and his own generals, that he had WMDs. He also convinced much of the U.S. government. If we reacted accordingly and he turns out not to have had WMDs, whose fault is that?”

But just because Kerry is likely to pursue a line of attack that’s stupid, doesn’t mean that Duelfer doesn’t expose a weakness in Bush. If Kerry were smarter (or more to the point, if Howard Dean hadn’t bullied the Democrats into being the anti-war party), he would attack Bush not for being dishonest, but for being incompetent. If I were Kerry, I’d make the following argument:

The Duelfer report exposes, once again, the scope of our intelligence failure. Under President Bush, our intelligence community didn’t see 9/11 coming. Under President Bush, our intelligence community didn’t understand the nature of the threat posed by Iraq’s WMD program. Now, should we have invaded Iraq? Yes. But the danger of Bush’s incompetence isn’t that his intelligence apparatus had a false positive. The danger is that this president is so incompetent that we are at great risk of a false negative. World affairs are not a court of law. We do not need proof beyond a reasonable doubt to protect our nation from known evildoers. But we do need to know where the threats really are so that we can deal with them, and, as 9/11, the Kay report, and now, the Duelfer report, demonstrate, this president is not on the ball enough to protect us from our enemies.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: If Kerry was running to Bush’s right on Iraq and terrorism, this election wouldn’t be close.