Photo by Dave Gorman

The by-week preview of the No Football Era of American sports got off to a promising start with a thrilling Spurs-Lakers Sunday afternoon game on ABC. I realized that I don’t think I’ve actually seen a full Spurs game so far this season (they start late, you know) and that San Antonio has weirdly dropped off the map as a championship contender according to most commentators. The case for the Spurs, however, seems very strong.

For one thing, the balance of curmudgeonly clichés overwhelmingly favors the Spurs. They trounce the competition in terms of players who Know How to Win the Big Games. They’ve got Popovich. They’ve played 30 games against the Wester Conference and Phoenix has only played 23. Defense wins championships. Tim Duncan’s a lock for the hall of fame. I’m not a big believer in these kind of sportswriter perennials, but it’s unnerving to never hear them. And I do believe in them at least a little; when you have a veteran team that’s won championships before, you don’t necessarily ask them to put the league-best regular season together. They’re confident, maybe coasting a little, maybe making sure there’s gas in the tank for the playoffs. But besides that, the Spurs also have quantitative factors going for them — Dallas has the better record, but the Spurs have the better point differential. Phoenix is amazing, and, obviously, they’re aesthetically brilliant as well as good at winning games, but I do think their act won’t work nearly as well in the playoffs. So it still looks like San Antonio to me.

Joe Lieberman says either Democrats fall in line behind George W. Bush or else he’s voting for John McCain:

“I’m open to supporting a Democrat, Republican, or even an Independent if there’s a strong one,” the U.S. Senator from Connecticut told “Fox News Sunday.” . . .

Asked about the current field of Democrat contenders for the presidency, all of whom have strong opposition to Bush’s Iraq policy, Lieberman said, “You make a decision based on a whole range of issues. But obviously, the positions that some candidates have taken in Iraq troubles me. Obviously, I will be looking at what positions they take in the larger war against Islamist terrorism.”

Do I need to go drag up all the times back in 2006 when Lieberman and his supporters urged Democrats not to make too big a deal out of disagreements on Iraq? I don’t necessarily think Lieberman is wrong about this. If I were in the Bush/Cheney/McCain Crazy Zone I’m not sure I could stomach voting for a reasonable candidate either.

In case you were wondering, here’s the Spartacist take on the Iranian nuclear issue:

Photo by Whiskeygonebad

More nuanced ideas are also available this fine weekend. Laura Secor’s excellent look at the Iranian political scene makes several points explicitly and I’d recommend you read the article yourself though you can also find Ogged’s take here. A couple of additional points are made implicitly by the article. One is simply that Iranian politics is complicated. It’s complicated institutionally, it’s complicated ideologically, and it’s complicated in terms of personalities and factions. The other point is that while you’d certainly rather live in a liberal democracy than under the Iranian political system, this is no kind of totalitarianism and the many people throwing that word around are just warmongering ignorantly.

The other must-read, via David Kurtz, is The Observer‘s look at the actual state of the Iranian nuclear program. It’s not so hot. Building nuclear bombs is hard. The Iranians don’t have access to the method materials, nor is the program funded as heavily as it might be. Right now, they aren’t making very much progress.

I was considering linking to this article about Hillary Clinton’s retrospective take on her Iraq vote and then firing up Google and Nexis to find all the many points of inconsistency between what she’s saying now and what she was saying throughout 2003. But why bother? The real question is whether we want to go through another election cycle dominated by the question of whether or not the Democratic nominee is a flip-flopper. As a flip-flopper myself, I can hardly maintain that flip-flopping on Iraq is the greatest sin in the world. But if you’re going to flip-flop then, I think, you’re better off just saying (à la John Edwards) that in light of events you’ve changed your mind.

Personally, exactly what people want to say about the retrospective issue isn’t the most important thing to me here — I’d rather here about forward-looking issues. Candidates, naturally, like to stay vague. I don’t take it as a good sign that she seems determined to position herself as the “most hawkish” of the major contenders in the race. A reflexive desire to appear tough was, pretty clearly, a major factor in the mistakes of the past . . . I’d like to see a president who’s over that.

Poor Dick Cheney can hardly restrain himself:

Viewed from afar, the stuff inside Hagel looks like the stuff that makes Republican presidential candidates. He is a third-generation party member who grew up idolizing Teddy Roosevelt and Dwight Eisenhower. He says he was the only student in his Roman Catholic high school to support Richard Nixon over John F. Kennedy in the 1960 presidential election—and when he cast his first vote, an absentee ballot from Vietnam, it was for Nixon’s winning ticket in 1968. His conservative credentials are impeccable: according to Congressional Quarterly, he voted with the White House more times in 2006 than any other senator. He is manly, Middle American—and when he talks about military matters, he exudes the cool confidence of a warrior-statesman who knows that war is hell.

But Hagel, who as of late last week was in the final stages of weighing a presidential run, is never mentioned in the top tier of Republican candidates for one, simple reason: since the initial buildup to the war in Iraq, he has assailed the Bush administration’s policy—in sharp words, in constant refrain and, most unforgivably, in public. His outburst last week was the culmination of a four-year campaign to raise public outrage about a war he’s always considered disastrous. His stance has earned him the enmity of the White House. Asked about Hagel last week in an interview with NEWSWEEK, Vice President Dick Cheney said: “I believe firmly in Ronald Reagan’s 11th Commandment: THOU SHALT NOT SPEAK ILL OF A FELLOW REPUBLICAN. But it’s very hard sometimes to adhere to that where Chuck Hagel is involved.”

Incidentally, I’ve always wondered did even Ronald Reagan adhere to this principle? What was happening during the ’76 primary? Isaac Chotiner raises the relevant point about Cheney: There doesn’t seem to be anyone in the White House powerful enough to prevent him from mouthing off in weird ways.