I'm pretty sure this debate occurred not at the Fest of Books yesterday but at the Wiltern Theater about a year ago.

No, I guess not...it was indeed the same four people debating the same thing a yr later, and I missed yesterday's. That's what I get for going to the Books Fest Sat instead of Sun!

What would have been interesting, would have been to have opened Royce an hour early and run excerpts from the same panelists comments a year earlier. Or maybe take a few dollars from all the $$ spent on banners and signage and actually have short produced segments air during the debate to see how some of these folks positions may have changes from a year ago.

Moderating is a true art, so I guess it would have also been nice to have a moderator who could have made it more of a conversation rather than a series of pontifications and speeches, and less pandering to the C-SPAN cameras. Someone has to tell Steve Wasserman that trying to figure in the words "rubrick" and "canard" into his remarks ads nothing but a few chuckles in the audience from those of us who see through the pomposity.

I have to say that three of the four performed very well. Scheer was vigorous; Hitchens was his usual piss-and-vinegar and Ignatieff was the best of all three with his zingers about Bush, Nader and Kerry. Danner on the other hand, was weak. At one point, he pulled out these stats on the rising death toll in Iraq, but didn't exactly have any way of displaying the chart from which he was citing. Besides, the dead Americans numbers were still quite low compared to those from our previous occupation efforts, including Vietnam. Not that his overall point -- which is anti-invasion -- wasn't correct. Just that such numbers weren't going to bolster his point.

Thanks for the tix, RiShawn! And yeah, I thought Danner was a drone, and Wasserman seemed like a man who needs to have the thesaurus surgically removed from his tongue. I liked Scheer's funny cheap shot about Harvard and Oxford, though; especially how it gave Ignatieff a jolt of angry adrenaline....

Sorry, I should have made it clear this was a revisiting of the Wiltern debate a year ago. They actually billed it that way.

I'm listening to it, and by acclaim (the measure by which most debates are judged), Scheer won the debate hands down, which I guess means that people who actually read books think the war is a fiasco. Not surprising to me.

the dead Americans numbers were still quite low

I'm sure the dead soldiers' families would be consoled by your declaration of statistical insignificance.

Given your statistical interest, here's a figure to chew on: The number of military casualties in Iraq since the president declared a "cessation of hostilities" far exceeds the number for any other military engagement in 228 years of American history.

Joseph, judged by acclaim, Scheer probably won last year too. But by logic Hitchens kicked him in both settings. I heard this debate on the radio today and was surprised at how murky and rambling Scheer was (I think his hometown cheering section made him woozy)... And how pissed Hitchens got, considering the strength of his argument. And yes, Wasserman seems a little taken with himself, though he was in the middle of his big weekend. And his book review is better than the NYT's, both because it's shorter and because he doesn't employ the wretch Kakutani.

KCRW has it up as a link, which probably works. But damnit, I am NOT going to do another 10 megabyte download just so Realplayer can find new nooks and cranies in my computer to befoul.

Joseph, judged by acclaim, Scheer probably won last year too. But by logic Hitchens kicked him in both settings. I heard this debate on the radio today and was surprised at how murky and rambling Scheer was (I think his hometown cheering section made him woozy)... And how pissed Hitchens got, considering the strength of his argument. And yes, Wasserman seems a little taken with himself, though he was in the middle of his big weekend. And his book review is better than the NYT's, both because it's shorter and because he doesn't employ the wretch Kakutani.

KCRW has it up as a link, which probably works. But damnit, I am NOT going to do another 10 megabyte download just so Realplayer can find new nooks and cranies in my computer to befoul.

I think you're wrong, and I think you've proven yourself wrong, if Scheer worked the crowd last year too. Forget content: the format of the recent debate, its segments too long, did not lend itself to bitter diatribe; rather, it demanded scattershot aphorisms set up by small discursive paragraphs. Scheer knows how to debate, and he states the obvious. It only takes a paragraph or two to do. Hitchens didn't have too many aphorisms in his arsenal, and he wasn't thinking in terms of paragraphs, but essays, which was death to listen to.

Beyond that, one way, certainly, to lose a debate is to let those who disagree with you know in so many words how stupid you think they are for lacking the sense to agree with you. One would have thought Hitchens was coached by a blogger for this debate; it's a sophomore's mistake, really. Scheer's extra experience going head-to-head all year on Left, Right and Center with David Frum and John O'Sullivan, two people much more skilled at this kind of debate than Hitchens, I think paid off handsomely.

I agree about Scheer's experience on the weekly show. Like the "end of show rant", he took advantage of being the last person to wrap-up with the skill of a practiced showman.

His "how dare you!", rising in pitch and volume, was a little too strenuous to be completely genuine. He reminded me of Andie McDowell in Short Cuts: "Goddam yooo! Goddam yooo!"

Isn't Robert Scheer a leftwing kook? I wouldn't trust anything coming out of his mouth any more than I'd trust the rantings of a wacko like Daniel Carver ("Wake up, white people!") of the KKK.

While Scheer is a blowhard, he's hardly a kook. Kooks are people who believe you can do whatever you want in the world because you have the biggest army, never believing that such power has limits.

I spent a skeptical afternoon recently, rereading Scheer's essay compilation "Thinking Tuna Fish, Talking Death" before seeing him speak at a local bookstore. So much for skepticism. He was really on target in many of the pieces of that collection, which was compiled in 1988 -- including some good pieces on the folly of spending so much preparing for a huge nuclear exchange, when the Soviet system was collapsing. And another reassessing the whole "foggy" Tonkin fabrication -- wish I had been rereading it last March as opposed to this March...

The title? What kind of dirty mind do you have? Scheer helpfully explains that it comes from a RAND study session he attended in Santa Monica, with the assembled experts preparing for Armageddon while munching on tuna fish petit fours.