Now that Yahoo has acquired MusicMatch, maybe they can fix the software.

I am a long-term user, I’ve paid several times for the product over the years, its basic interface works for me better than iTunes, and I’m used to it, I don’t want to change. But: In trying to turn a good music client into a boffo music store, MusicMatch has repeatedly broken its software. Most recently, the thing crashes whenever I try to copy a CD to my hard drive. This same bug existed for months last spring, then MusicMatch finally fixed it — now it has reappeared in the latest update. (The “volume leveling” feature, which would be highly useful if it worked, has also always crashed.)

Frankly, MusicMatch, I don’t care about your store. I just want your software, once the best of its kind, to work.

The trouble with the font debate and the Swift Boat Vets debate and all the other trivia that the Republicans have succeeded in dominating the news with — and, yes, the Bush service record trivia that the Democrats have fumblingly attempted to retort with — is that we will forget it all after November 2. It will be as irrelevant as outdated poll numbers.

What we will still be facing, whoever wins, is a situation abroad that gets worse by the week and an economy at home that’s sputtering. For all the commander-in-chief bravado and the rhetoric of decisiveness, President Bush has managed to distract the nation from the essential rudderlessness of his leadership. In his four years of running the country, he has majored in punting problems, fudging outcomes and delaying reckonings.

This is the Bush administration’s principal behavior pattern, its fundamental survival principle, one no doubt etched into Karl Rove’s DNA: Do whatever it takes to run the clock out. The pattern established itself, of course, in the fiasco of the Florida vote recount. It emerged in controversies as diverse as Dick Cheney’s fight to keep the doors of his energy commission closed and the pseudo-Solomonic “compromise” over stem-cell research. It’s profoundly evident in Bush economic policy, with its bogus “expiring” tax cuts designed to loot the Treasury as quickly as possible without scaring people over the resulting national bankruptcy. And it is the blueprint for how Bush’s team duped the nation into the Iraq war with a barrage of misinformation: They said whatever they had to in order to rally public support up until the launch of the invasion, when they could count on a support-our-boys dynamic to kick in.

The other part of the Bush modus operandi is, take irrevocable steps. The Bush administration has already made havoc of our fiscal health, our national defense and our hope of actually prevailing in the struggle against radical Islam. Much of what it has done can’t be undone. Short-term thinking — what do we have to do to get through the next election? — has made long-term trouble.

A small and spiteful part of me can’t help thinking, “Let Bush win — let him deal with his own mess!” Except there is no indication that a second-term Bush will take any more ownership of his messes than a first-term Bush. This, perhaps, is the ultimate irony of the Bush presidency: For all the campaign-biography mythos of a misspent youth redeemed by Jesus and a sober adulthood, George W. Bush is using the presidency to play out his own drama of irresponsibility on a nation-size stage. Once a wastrel, always a wastrel.

Bonus link: If you are still harboring any doubts about just how strategically stupid the Iraq invasion was, read Juan Cole’s essay on al-Qaida’s war aims.

Jay Rosen has more to say on the lunatic ethics policy at the Miami Herald that forbids reporters from attending benefit concerts. He points out that the Herald editor who counseled that buying Springsteen tickets would imperil his paper’s credibility saw no problem with signing a petition “along with 32 others at the Herald. They and more than 2,800 like-minded professionals want the Justice Department to stop pressuring journalists to reveal confidential sources.”

All I can say is, if the Bush-service documents CBS presented on “Sixty Minutes” yesterday really are forgeries, then boy, what incompetent work!

For those who missed the backstory, people — from the blogosphere to the Washington Post — are pointing out that those memos are typed in a proportional font, Times Roman, and such typography would have been unusual (though not totally impossible) in the early ’70s.

As a teen type geek at the time, I recall jealously eyeing those IBM electric typewriters — the IBM Executives — that did proportional spacing, and occasionally I got to play with them. (But boy was it hard to fix typos with Korectype — the characters wouldn’t line up!) But it’s strange to think a military office would have had one. So certainly, there’s something odd here.

But the forgery scenario has problems, too. It’s pretty damn easy to set your word processor to a monospace font like Courier. I do all my writing that way, in fact. (All right, I’m nostalgic — I still cherish that monospace clarity, see?) So if these things are fake, then someone took an immense amount of care to futz up the papers and make them look old and get a signature on there that experts seem to think is a pretty good rendition of Lt. Col. Jerry B. Killian’s — then forgot to change the fonts on his word processor.

It’s certainly possible. But it seems awfully strange. Furthermore, if you were going to the trouble of producing a forgery, wouldn’t you go all out and really nail Bush directly on something more spectacular than the murkier, though still somewhat incriminating, details of these memos?

As we continue to sift through the spotty record of George Bush’s military service, it’s good to keep in mind the point Josh Marshall makes: “This isn’t about what President Bush did 30+ years ago. Or at least it’s not primarily about that. The issue here is that for a decade President Bush has been denying all of these things. He did so last January. He did so again as recently as last month. He’s continued to cover this stuff up right from the Oval Office.”

Or, as our Eric Boehlert puts it, “The controversy, after all, is not merely about how he received a million dollars’ worth of free pilot training and then stiffed the government when it came time to pay it back in service. It’s also about how, for the last decade, Bush and his advisors have done everything possible to distort, if not erase, the truth about Bush’s service record in order to advance his political career.”

Now we have a flood of new jigsaw puzzle pieces, including this strange one from May 19, 1972, in which Bush’s Texas commander writes: “Physical. We talked about him getting his flight physical situation fixed before his date. Says he will do that in Alabama if he stays in flight status. He has this campaign to do and other things that will follow and may not have the time. I advised him of our investment in him and his commitment. He’s been working with staff to come up with options and identified a unit that may accept him. I told him I had to have written acceptance before he would be transferred, but think he’s also talking to someone upstairs.” Another memo records a direct order to Bush to take the physical.

Now, I’ll accept that young Bush was a busy guy, with political campaigns to run and parties to attend — but here he is, he’s been in the Guard for four years, what’s the big deal about a physical? How long does it take, an afternoon? Why was it so important to him not to undergo this routine procedure?

I’m afraid this is the sort of query that leads one toward that other swamp of evasion in the Bush record — those questions about his alleged drug use that have always been answered with nods, winks, comments about having been “young and irresponsible” and denials of drug use carrying carefully crafted expiration dates. Earlier this year, Boehlert reported on the strange coincidence that Bush’s Guard disappearing act almost exactly coincided with the institution of random drug testing for military personnel: “At the time when Bush, perhaps for the first time in his life, faced the prospect of a random drug test, his military records show he virtually disappeared, failing for at least one year to report for Guard duty.”

The odds of our ever knowing the truth about that aspect of Bush’s life are even worse than the odds of our getting his service record clear. And bringing the issue up without knowing the truth is not the sort of thing that makes anyone feel good: Who did or didn’t inhale (or snort) three decades ago ought to be covered by veils of privacy and statutes of limitation.

But decorum feels like surrender in this mad electoral fight. The Bush campaign has gone completely off the rails in its smears of Kerry’s service record. Even if you don’t want to consider the facts and just look at the charges, there’s no equivalency here between the issues under dispute. In one case, we’re arguing over how serious a guy’s battlefield wounds were; in the other, we’re weighing whether to call absenteeism and cover-ups by their proper names. What a falling-off!

It may be ugly, it’s certainly no one’s idea of what this country should be talking about during this election, but with the whirlwind of attention on his military record Bush is reaping what his August barrage against Kerry’s record sowed. It’s rough justice.

In his address to the Republican convention last night, Zell Miller showed he is no democrat. That’s a lower-case “d”: I’m not talking about the political party Miller, a Georgia senator, nominally belongs to. I mean that Miller doesn’t seem to understand the simple basics of our system of government.

Salon’s Tim Grieve has already taken apart the distortions of fact in Miller’s (and other) convention speeches. (Those weapons systems he complains Kerry opposed? Then-defense secretary Dick Cheney questioned them, too.) And Miller’s rhetorical question, “Where is the bipartisanship in this country when we need it most?” should rightly be addressed to President Bush, who, in the days after 9/11, stood astride the most unprecedented swell of bipartisanship in decades — and then squandered it on narrow, extremist policies, dirty-pool politics and a divisively launched and incompetently executed war in Iraq.

No, I want to talk about this sentence in Miller’s speech: “Today, at the same time young Americans are dying in the sands of Iraq and the mountains of Afghanistan, our nation is being torn apart and made weaker because of the Democrats’ manic obsession to bring down our commander in chief.”

Strip this of its spin and modifiers and what Miller is saying is, “While Americans are dying, the opposition party is trying to win the election, and that hurts the nation.”

Well, what does Miller suggest Americans do who honestly believe that George Bush is making disastrous mistakes at home and abroad? Grin and bear it and fall in line — because, hey, he is the commander in chief? The very fact that “young Americans are dying” — many of whom very likely did not have to be dying — is what fires up much of the opposition to the president. But Miller thinks that if soldiers are dying, the essential work of democracy — endorsing our leaders or replacing them if we think they’re screwing up — must halt.

Note the militarism here. Forget that our Constitution puts the civilian authority in charge of the military; in Miller’s rhetoric, “commander in chief” trumps “president.” And dissent equals insubordination.

Miller’s speech goes on to declare, “It is the soldier, not the reporter, who has given us the freedom of the press. It is the soldier, not the poet, who has given us freedom of speech. It is the soldier, not the agitator, who has given us the freedom to protest.”

I’m sorry, senator, but you couldn’t be more wrong. (And every Republican who applauded you needs a remedial civics class). It is the U.S. constitution that bestows these freedoms. Executives and legislators sometimes try to abridge them. Soldiers, for the most part, protect them. But from the time of the nation’s Founding Fathers on, American leaders, thinkers and citizens have been conscious of the tension between our cherished civil freedoms and the logic of warfare. Waging war demands sacrifice and obedience — and compromises freedom. And so democracies rightly and appropriately go to war reluctantly, and voters demand that their leaders show that there is no alternative to fighting.

Oh, right, that’s why we’re having an election-year debate about a “war of choice” in the first place.

I can’t imagine anyone watching Miller’s frothing speech and feeling reassured about the direction Bush is taking us. It was an outburst of intimidation, intended to cow. Dave Winer heard the jackboots behind it: “Why was the Miller speech so scary? Answer — you’re next. That’s what Miller was saying. After this election we put on the brown shirts.” That may be a little over the top, but the fact that’s it’s only a little over the top is itself chilling. Josh Marshall heard the same noise, just a little more muted: “This whole confab has been built around militarism, the seductions of the mentality of siege and insecurity both from without and within, and the sort of no-rules-win-at-all-costs-lie-if-it-works mentality that will lead this nation to grief.”

There is no Bush administration record to run on: At home they’ve raided the treasury and looted the future of Social Security for tax cuts for the rich, and abroad they’ve squandered the support of the world and bungled the war on the perpetrators of 9/11. All the Republicans can do — as we’ve seen this week –is attack, attack, attack. They’re trying to plant a little seed of terror in each voter’s mind, hoping to immobilize the opposition and persuade the undecided that they don’t dare hope for anything better. Scariest of all is that it has a chance of working.

At the O’Reilly Emerging Technologies conference earlier this year I was lucky enough to get a demo of Flickr, the photo-sharing software and service from Ludicorp. (The company’s president, Stewart Butterfield, is married to Caterina Fake, who did great design work here at Salon several years ago.) At the time I thought it was a neat little photo-sharing tool, but it seemed a little heavy on the Flash, which sometimes makes my head ache, and life got busy and I never got around to exploring it further. Since then Flickr has won much acclaim, and when I needed to figure out a simple way to share photos from a recent family trip, I thought I’d give it another spin last night. Turns out it has evolved beautifully since my introduction to it, and I ended up playing with it for hours, so let me now belatedly add my enthusiasm to the chorus.

It’s an exquisitely well designed Web application, certainly one of the best I’ve ever seen, full of smart interface choices and nice little finishing touches that let you know that the developers who’ve built it are also heavy users of their own handiwork.

Tiny example: I noticed Flickr was dating the photos based on the date I uploaded them, so I went in to change a bunch of dates to reflect when the photos were taken. The page contained this helpful message: “The date posted is the date & time you physically published your photo on Flickr, not the date the photo was taken. We are currently storing the date that your photo was taken in the database, so rest assured you won’t need to modify every photo later… There will soon be a way to sort your photos based on the date the photo was taken. Stay tuned!” So I didn’t waste my time. That’s what I call a considerate piece of software. And along the way you learn that Flickr is respectfully storing each photo’s metadata (date, type of camera used, all that EXIF stuff that you almost never need to look at, except when you do).

It’s easy to get started with Flickr, and then when you want to push it and do more with it, it leads you gently into its depths. It has a whole layer of social software — profiles, groups, and so forth — but since its primary function is photo sharing, that social software actually has a raison d’etre, so you don’t just sit there (as with so many other ventures in this area) and wonder “Now that we’re here and we know each other’s hobbies and marital status, what exactly do we do?”

I am generally distrustful of using Web applications as anything more than conveniences for away-from-home access. I want my data close at hand, and most Web interfaces are still too clunky to allow for fast and complex organizing of serious quantities of stuff. But I’m seriously thinking about making Flickr my photo home base — it’s that good. And if Flickr’s speedy evolution in a mere six months is any indication, the thing is going to improve — and grow — at an intense rate.