Victor Bout, one of the world's most famous and wanted arms traffickers, was arrested Thursday in Thailand. The guy has been tied to efforts to fuel blood-soaked wars in Angola and Liberia, Afghanistan and Columbia, and many others. He has long been blacklisted by the United States Treasury Department and signaled out by the United Nations. He inspired the Nicholas Cage movie "Lord of War." The New York Times has a story on his arrest up here. It is good news.

Left out of the New York Times' story, however, was the United States military's own documented role in hiring companies tied to Bout's empire. Back in 2004, I wrote about refueling records that showed planes owned by a company the United Nations had tied to Bout were landing on U.S. military air bases in Iraq. This was happening despite a Treasury order that made it illegal for any U.S. company or person to do business with Bout. I was unable to identify the specific contract for which the U.S. government had hired the Bout-connected planes.

Months later, Newsweek's Mike Isikoff was able to confirm what I had only suspected. The Bout-tainted planes had been hired by Kellogg Brown and Root, then a subsidiary of Halliburton, as part of a logistical support contract for the military. If Bout goes to trial, an uncertain possibility according to Bout-expert Douglas Farah, it will be fascinating. This guy knows where a lot of skeletons are buried.

Somehow I didn't get on this one, so no preview, but here it is.

So much ink is spilled interpreting the race and sex dynamics of the Democratic Party: Hillary Clinton often wins women, Barack Obama inevitably wins blacks. Identity politics lives on. But my former boss, Salon.com's Walter Shapiro, points to another demographic trend that came into striking relief in the Ohio exit polls: The age gap.

The age breaks were lock-step precise with Clinton rising and Obama falling as each of the six age cohorts became progressively older. Obama won the youngest voters (those 17-24) by a landslide margin of 75-to-24 percent. Clinton, on the other hand, racked up an almost equally lopsided 70-to-29 victory among voters eligible for Social Security. In summary, the 46-year-old Obama carried voters younger than he is (those 17 to 45), while Clinton won those who are older.

There are lots of factors dividing the young and the old in America, but I wonder if these numbers say less about the 14-year age difference between Obama and Clinton, who is 60, than the different appeals of their brands. "Hope" is, after all, nearly a synonym for youth, while "experience" is the reward of old age.

Take this line of thinking to the extreme, and I am left with this caricature of the Democratic electorate: Those older than Obama see him as a naive kid, while those younger see him as a manifestation of their own ambitions and optimism. On the flip side, younger voters see Clinton as a chiding parent, while older voters see her as a wise woman. These are just rough outlines, and they may be way off. But it does seem increasingly clear that we are witnessing another generational struggle for the soul of the Democratic Party.

Another thought: If Obama wins the nomination, this generational dynamic is sure to move to the general election against 71-year-old John McCain. If Clinton wins, not as much.

This development is going to come as big news on the Hillary Clinton campaign plane, where staff and reporters have been popping this stuff like Necco wafers.

"NAFTAgate" started out as a slightly surreal meta-story, one in which one campaign (Clinton) attempted to tar another campaign (Obama) for operating as campaigns often do:* demagoguing an issue while tacitly admitting that they're, well, demagoguing it. Now the Clinton campaign will have to explain why they demagogued Obama on NAFTAgate while also telling the Canadian government to take their stand on NAFTA itself with "a grain of salt."

Can't wait for the next conference call!

* Yes, yes, the HRC folks think every instance of Obama behaving like "traditional politician" is in itself worth attacking him for. I am less convinced of that in general, but this doesn't mean that Obama should be given a pass when it comes to untangling a seemingly contradictory set of messages... just as Hillary should have to explain hers.

I assume most readers here are interested enough in politics to realize that Time's coverage of it doesn't stop at Swampland's edge. Our colleague James Poniewozik often delves into matters political over at his blog about television, Tuned In; I'm going to make more of an effort to alert you all to his wonkier side when I can. Here are his takes on the future of election coverage, Jack's Hillary ad, and Hillary's 3AM ad. All worth a look.

Other places to look for crossover into our topics: The Curious Capitalist, and the Middle East Blog (where I just now happened on this interesting post on the arrival of the USS Cole in Lebanon) -- though you certainly don't have to stop there, take a look around, enjoy yourself! And if you find something appropriate for discussion here, or just of interest to Swampland readers, before we do, please let us know in the comments.

Ana, if there's any paper in the country that has an eager audience for political process stories, it's the Washington Post. As a former newspaper reporter myself (and, yes, still one at heart), I think this was a good call on the part of the editors.

I also would bet, given the amount of reporting that went to that double truck, that this was a story the paper originally assigned so that it could be prepared for the not-unlikely possibility that Tuesday would be the end of the Clinton campaign. It would have been a how-it-all-fell-apart obit for the campaign. That, obviously, didn't happen. But in the meantime, there was growing competitive pressure, given that the Los Angeles Times has taken a bite of this apple over the weekend. So they decided they had better go with what they had or risk losing the exclusivity of all that string they had gathered. Again, a smart call.

UPDATE: One more point, and I guess a glaringly obvious one. Voters in this election are going to be choosing among three candidates who have virtually no executive experience, for a job that involves running the most complicated enterprise in the world. I think you have to go pretty far back to find a similar situation in a presidential election. So it's worth spending some time looking at how they are managing their campaigns, as a possible indicator of what that management style might mean in the White House. One of the points I found fascinating in the story by Peter Baker and Anne Kornblut was the suggestion that all this turmoil has been deliberate on Hillary Clinton's part:

One of Clinton's favorite books is "Team of Rivals," Doris Kearns Goodwin's account of Abraham Lincoln's Cabinet, and she assembled her own team of advisers knowing their mutual enmity in the belief that good ideas come from vigorous discussion. But while many campaigns are beset by backbiting and power struggles, dozens of interviews indicate that the internal problems endured by the Clinton team have been especially corrosive.

In the issue of dead-tree TIME that comes out tomorrow, David Von Drehle and I look at the rough weeks ahead and the possible consequences for the Democrats.

There's a quote from me in today's WP about how "we only have so many stories to write, and we're running out of them." This story, also in the WP, may be kind of story that results from the primaries going on so unbearably long. The process story is not a new genre, and I have not been observing campaigns for as long as my colleagues, but, at least compared to last cycle, this level of detail -- and story length -- about a campaign staff's bickering didn't appear until the general, did it? (UPDATE: I have just realized that The Google can help answer this question and I shall ask it. See note below about the coffee intake level when I wrote this.) This cycle, coverage of the McCain implosion seems an exception, since it was a full-on implosion and not simply subtle changes and rivalries that are naked to the non-obsessed eye. And even then, there was probably too much of it. (Especially since all those pronouncements of death have given so many cause for chagrin.)

UPDATE: Here's a Google archive search for "infighting+presidential+primary+campaign" in news stories from 2003 and 2004. It is mostly picking up stories about bouts between primary candidates, not among a candidates' staff: A notable exception is coverage of Kerry's decision to change campaign managers in November of 2003. And this back-looking tick-tock of Dean's operation, post-pull-out, which I'd argue is a different genre. If anyone has suggestions for a better search, or other ways to prove that I should not post before my second cup, lemme know.

More marginally hypocritical navel-gazing [That may be irrelevant if you think I've now disproved my own thesis! -- amc] after the jump.

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