Matthew Dowd: Finally Traveling at the Speed of Obvious

It may be that a week of sunshine and sloth have lulled my brain into a Vitamin D and tequila-drenched stupor, but my initial response to this is "big deal." I suppose it's something that Bush's re-election campaign strategist has reached the astonishing conclusion that he worked for hacks with nonexistent social commitments; hell, I'm even willing to give Dowd somewhat of a pass for thinking that Bush "cared about education" while he was occupying whatever passes for an executive branch in Texas during the 1990s.

What I can't abide, though, are meaningless gestures like these from someone who urged Bush to use the Swift Boat attacks for all they were worth:

“I think we should design campaigns that appeal not to 51 percent of the people,” he said, “but bring the country together as a whole.”

He said that he still believed campaigns must do what it takes to win, but that he was never comfortable with the most hard-charging tactics. He is now calling for “gentleness” in politics. He said that while he tried to keep his own conduct respectful during political combat, he wanted to “do my part in fixing fissures that I may have been part of.”

I'm sure this sort of High Broderism will be just as consequential as Lee Atwater's deathbed conversion to the cause of civility. While Dowd doesn't come within a mile of Atwater's unblemished trail of sin, his record as a political strategist will always bear the weight -- I would argue justifiably -- of one insidious presidential campaign, for which he will forever dangle from a hook. The big difference between the two men, of course, is that Atwater is currently resting toe-up in a pine box; Dowd, meanwhile, is young, healthy and presumably capable of doing something constructive with his newly-discovered sense of conscience.

Alas.

Mr. Dowd does not seem prepared to put his views to work in 2008. The only candidate who appeals to him, he said, is Senator Barack Obama, Democrat of Illinois, because of what Mr. Dowd called his message of unity. But, he said, “I wouldn’t be surprised if I wasn’t walking around in Africa or South America doing something that was like mission work.”

He added, “I do feel a calling of trying to re-establish a level of gentleness in the world.”

He's also apparently written a "never-submitted" op-ed entitled "Kerry Was Right." Now that's commitment!

If we were keeping score, I'd just go ahead and declare an automatic five-point deduction for anyone who uses this article as further "evidence" that the Bush administration is falling apart. Dowd's revelations are worse than useless.

Comparative Evidence of Idiocy

I've always thought skipping the 13th floor (although calling it "12A" rather than skipping it is a new one on me) has always been among the starkest evidence about the number of extremely stupid and irrational people a country has. I'm still not sure if it's worse than the fact that astrology columns appear in major newspapers, though...

Friday Cat Blogging... Nelson and Starbuck

"Before you could say Eric Keroack you'd turn your back and I'd be gone."

The anti-contraception wingnut appointed to oversee the nation's birth control policy has resigned. Lots of interesting stuff at the link about Keroack's rather fishy medical practice. Also, there's a good reminder of this story about the scientifically inaccurate propaganda distributed at his "crisis pregnancy centers":

A Woman’s Concern promotes itself to pregnant women considering abortion as a “pregnancy health center designed just for you.” Nowhere does the center reveal that its real mission is to dissuade women from abortion.

The center staff told our volunteer misinformation and lies about abortion. Counselors provided gruesome exaggerated details of an abortion procedure – including a description of “prying” open her cervix to get the “bigger baby out” because her pregnancy was past the first trimester. Our volunteer was also told gross exaggerations about the risks associated with RU-486 (the abortion pill), including hemorrhaging and ineffectiveness.

Counselors further made false assertions about the mental health effects of abortion –including telling our volunteer that she would likely have severe depression as a result of her abortion and that this was a common occurrence. Such assertions about “post-abortion syndrome” are not supported by the weight of scientific evidence, nor recognized by major psychiatric associations.

A Woman’s Concern also provided our volunteer with pamphlets containing information falsely linking abortion to a risk of breast cancer. This long-time anti-abortion myth has been repeatedly discredited. Other pamphlets in the center’s waiting room likewise contained disinformation about condoms and sexually transmitted infections, and were often seriously outdated.

A Woman’s Concern adopts an air of medical authority but in actuality it fails to provide accurate information or legitimate medical services of use to any woman.

Good riddance.

The Moderate Senator...Who Terrorized Chris Matthews!

It is quite remarkable how obsessed Chris Matthews, remains with Bill Clinton's sex life. (Why the adultery of Hillary Clinton's husband is a major campaign issue while we can be free to swoon over Republican adulterers, some of whom actively humiliate their exes, remains unclear. Although one prominent law professor does claim that Hillary's campaign events are being used as fronts for Bill to meet women -- I'm sure Matthews will be discussing that soon.) Needless to say, this is just one dimension to his exceptionally creepy misogyny. Bob Somerby finds Matthews engaging in the following sober analysis, in language that occasionally bears resemblances to English:

You know, somewhere out in the Atlantic Ocean, I think there might be a giant, green, ugly, horny monster. A gigantic, gigantic monster of anti-Hillary, and anti-woman Hillary, anti-liberal woman Hillary, some real ferocious beast out there that says no matter what happens between now and Election Day, they're not going to let her win. Men, some women, are just not going to let this woman, this woman win the presidency. I don't know whether that monster's out there. All men I meet are afraid to talk like that. You only hear criticism of Hillary from smart, college-educated women. They're the ones that always have a problem with her now.

[Count Floyd] Vasn't That Scarrrrry! [/Count Floyd] I know I can't have a conversation with a smart, college-educated women without her expressing abject terror about Hillary Clinton winning the presidency either! I'm assuming they all really like the idea of the Straight Talk Express running into town to invade their uterus, though.

In Defense of Iwo

In a March 3 American Prospect article, Charles Taylor did a fine job of debunking the myth of Clint Eastwood. As Scott has noted, while Eastwood is a talented filmmaker, his catalogue is uneven, and the worst work nearly unwatchable. Unfortunately, in the process of criticizing Eastwood, Taylor gets his latest work, Letters from Iwo Jima, badly wrong.

Taylor and Stephanie Zacharek have argued that Eastwood presents a picture of the Imperial Japanese Army that takes insufficient account of its brutality. In World War II, the Japanese Army operated with barbarity against both civilian and military foes. The IJA committed many atrocities in its eight year was against China, including most notably the Rape of Nanking. After capturing the Chinese capital, the IJA ran wild, raping and beheading civilians without any apparent purpose other than terror. In Manila in 1945, a retreating and isolated Japanese army turned its frustration on the local population, massacring thousands before American forces could retake the city. The Imperial Japanese Army’s treatment of prisoners was similarly brutal. After defeating a combined Filipino-American force at Bataan, the IJA marched 75000 American and Filipino troops nine days in horrific conditions, killing thousands. Similarly, 16000 surrendered Allied troops died in slave-labor conditions during the construction of the Burma-Thailand Railway. The issue of Japanese use of “comfort women”, or forced sex slaves, has again come to the fore as a consequence of the unfortunate comments of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. Indeed, the depredations of the Imperial Japanese Army had effects beyond the murder of its victims. As Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper detail in Forgotten Armies, the brutality of the Japanese Army in China, Burma, Malaya, and elsewhere helped undercut support from anti-colonial groups that might otherwise have been sympathetic with, or at least neutral toward, Japan’s pan-Asian propaganda.

Taylor and Zacharek contend that because Eastwood doesn’t depict the Japanese Army massacring civilians or killing very many American prisoners, Letters from Iwo Jima amounts to a whitewash. Of course, there were few civilians on Iwo Jima for the Japanese Army to massacre, and because of the tactical situation it had very few opportunities to brutalize and kill American prisoners. This left Eastwood with several options. He could refrain from making a movie depicting the Japanese view of the Battle of Iwo Jima. He could demonstrate Japanese brutality through flashbacks, an effective if clumsy device. Finally, Eastwood could, instead of giving us obvious examples of Japanese brutality, show us an Army that would, given the opportunity, commit atrocities. Eastwood chose the last, and did his job with uncharacteristic subtlety. He told the story so well, in fact, that some critics seem to have missed it entirely.

Taylor saw a stylized, honorable Japanese Army that bore no relationship to the real Japanese Army. Eastwood showed me, on the other hand, an army capable of committing the atrocities of Manila and Nanking. Eastwood ably demonstrated the character of the Imperial Japanese Army, both how it understood itself and how that understanding could break down into an orgy of unrestrained, irrational violence. Early in the film, as the Americans take control of Mount Suribachi, a group of Japanese soldiers is ordered to abandon their position and retreat to a more defensible point. Infused with “warrior ethos” several in this group decide to commit suicide (using hand grenades) instead of obeying orders and retreating. The rest of the group, less enthusiastic about detonating themselves, nevertheless complies because of both overwhelming social pressure and the very real threat of battlefield execution. This scene is key to Eastwood’s understanding of the Imperial Japanese Army, but neither Taylor nor Zacharek mention it. Along with a few others, this scene demonstrates that Eastwood understands the internal problems that helped lead the IJA to commit atrocities.

Armies do not, by and large, commit atrocities because they’re full of horrible people. Instead, they engage in horrific behavior because of institutional and situational factors. Military units that display extreme ideological commitment easily dehumanize the enemy, leaving just a few short steps to atrocity. Even then, committing atrocity doesn’t often appeal to a lot of soldiers. Social cohesion and pressure to conform, especially in a culture that puts a particularly high value on conformity, can lead soldiers to temporarily forget their own values in favor of group togetherness. Terror also pushes soldiers to commit atrocities, both in response to threats from their own comrades and as a reaction to fear of the enemy. Finally, while some armies commit atrocities in response to direct orders from superiors, many don’t. Military units that respond poorly and erratically to central orders tend to take matters into their own hands, including relations with civilians and prisoners of war. The political imperative to treat conquered civilians and captured prisoners humanely requires tight discipline at the unit level, as the urge for vengeance and rampage can easily take over a group of soldiers.

Eastwood gives us an army designed for atrocity. He depicts the Japanese Army as enthusiastic to the point of irrationality, deeply invested in social cohesion and group conformity, terrified both of itself and of the overwhelming American power, yet with extremely poor chain of command discipline. This is an army that would, given the opportunity, do terrible things. That it lacked the opportunity on Iwo doesn’t change the fundamental nature of the organization. Eastwood reminds us that the men of such an army, in spite of all the evil that they could do, still clutch pictures of their loved ones when they die. Moreover, he shows us the limits of what professional soldiers can do within such an organization. While Taylor saw the depictions of General Kuribayashi and Baron Nishi as a mixture of archetypes borrowed from war and samurai movies, I saw a couple of officers trying to win a battle, hindered not just by the Americans but also by the limits of their own organization. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the characteristics that make an army likely to commit atrocities also make it ineffective on the battlefield. The Japanese Army performed unevenly during World War II, combining occasional brilliance with consistent problems of discipline, supply, and organization. The suicidal tendencies that Kuribayashi has to deal with make it harder to defend Iwo, not easier.

Eastwood doesn’t literally show us the Rape of Nanking. Instead, he does something far more important; he shows us the army capable of committing the Rape of Nanking, and the Bataan Death March, the Burma-Thailand Railroad, and the atrocities in Manila. Both Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima attempt to understand the battlefront in terms of the home front. In the former, Eastwood is at his clumsiest and most obvious. In the latter, he’s at his most subtle. Letters from Iwo Jima should be understood as part of a family of films, along with Breaker Morant, Battle of Algiers, or The Grand Illusion, that conceptualize the practice of war as distinct from but embedded within a larger social universe. It’s among Eastwood’s best work, and critical over-appreciation of Eastwood’s other films shouldn’t obscure its quality.

Cross-posted to TAPPED.

The Crucial Question

Fred Thompson scares me in the general more than Matt if he could secure the nomination. (I think Giuliani is a poor general election candidate -- he largely takes social issues of the table, which won't be good for the GOP in a lot of swing states, and paradoxically his lengthy record of social liberalism means that he will have to make more specific claims about the unpopular goal of overturning Roe more generic reactionaries like Bush had to.) On the other hand, I think it's important to consider that campaign restrictions may result in his Law & Order reruns being taken off the air, which is a major social good. It would be one step toward returning to the golden age of L&O reruns, when the crappy new episodes were relegated to TNT where they could be easily avoided while the good old ones were on A&E. Has someone asked Dianne Wiest about running for the Senate somewhere?

Purpose?

Via Drum, this seems quite likely right to me:

The Revolutionary Guard may also have hoped to sabotage diplomatic negotiations over the nuclear issue. U.S. Undersecretary of State Nicholas Burns said several weeks ago that the United States was getting "pinged all over the world" by Iranian intermediaries who wanted a resumption of talks. Iran's chief negotiator, Ali Larijani, hinted at such a message in his recent contacts with the European Union's top diplomat, Javier Solana. But the prospect of nuclear talks may have been blown out of the water, as it were, until the British issue is resolved.

Maybe that was the goal of seizing the sailors and marines. The Revolutionary Guard, after all, can't be happy about curbing the nuclear program that would allow it to project power even more aggressively.

This is the problem with neocons; everyone has them. Just like the United States, Iran has a group of people who believe that the enemy only understands force, and that semi-treasonous diplomats seeking negotiations do nothing but weaken the nation. Whether in Iran or the US, their response to a dangerous situation is always the advocacy of more force, of a more threatening posture, and of less negotiation. When they're allowed to control parts of the foreign policy and defense apparatus of the state, things get very dangerous very quickly.

Irregular Air Power

According to Jane's Defence Weekly, the airstrike that the Tamil Tigers launched against a government airfield is the first air attack by a non-state armed group. Is that true? I can't think of any other examples off the top of my head (other, perhaps, than the rather special case of the 9/11 attacks), but it sounds a bit unlikely to me. Anybody have any ideas?

Kingdaddy Unleashed

Victor Davis Hanson feels the wrath. Given how VD Hanson interprets Herodotus and Thucydides, what must he have taught the fine undergraduates of the Classics Department at Fresno State University?

But If We Make Access to the Ballot Easier, Democratic Unicorns Will Steal Our Elections!

A really terrific piece by Michael Waldman and Justin Levitt about the GOP's vote fraud fraud. The scam is advanced by the common method of "generalizing from apocryphal anecdotes":

Allegations of voter fraud -- someone sneaking into the polls to cast an illicit vote -- have been pushed in recent years by partisans seeking to justify proof-of-citizenship and other restrictive ID requirements as a condition of voting. Scare stories abound on the Internet and on editorial pages, and they quickly become accepted wisdom.

But the notion of widespread voter fraud, as these prosecutors found out, is itself a fraud. Firing a prosecutor for failing to find wide voter fraud is like firing a park ranger for failing to find Sasquatch. Where fraud exists, of course, it should be prosecuted and punished. (And politicians have been stuffing ballot boxes and buying votes since senators wore togas; Lyndon Johnson won a 1948 Senate race after his partisans famously "found" a box of votes well after the election.) Yet evidence of actual fraud by individual voters is painfully skimpy.

Before and after every close election, politicians and pundits proclaim: The dead are voting, foreigners are voting, people are voting twice. On closer examination, though, most such allegations don't pan out. Consider a list of supposedly dead voters in Upstate New York that was much touted last October. Where reporters looked into names on the list, it turned out that the voters were, to quote Monty Python, "not dead yet."

Or consider Washington state, where McKay closely watched the photo-finish gubernatorial election of 2004. A challenge to ostensibly noncitizen voters was lodged in April 2005 on the questionable basis of "foreign-sounding names." After an election there last year in which more than 2 million votes were cast, following much controversy, only one ballot ended up under suspicion for double-voting. That makes sense. A person casting two votes risks jail time and a fine for minimal gain. Proven voter fraud, statistically, happens about as often as death by lightning strike.

Yet the stories have taken on the character of urban myth.

And not only does the grossly exaggerated problem of voter fraud detract attention from the really serious problems with voting in this country, such as unreliable voting machines that vary across districts, insufficiently staffed vote booths, etc.--these urban legends are used to actually oppose efforts to make it easier to vote, as it is in most liberal democracies (which don't seem to have problems running fair elections.)

...see LizardBreath as well.

Cicero: Is there anything he can't do?

Minstrel Boy channels some kickass Cicero to think about the attorney scandal. From In Verrem:

Gentlemen of the court, at this great political crisis there has been offered to you, not through man's wisdom but almost as the direct gift of heaven, the very thing you most need---a thing that will help more than anything else to mitigate the unpopularity of your Order and the suspicion surrounding these courts. A belief has become established---as harmful to the republic as it is to yourselves---that these courts, with your senators as the jury, will never convict any man, however guilty, if he has sufficient money.

The problem, of course, is that while Quintus Hortensius had shame, George W. Bush does not. Via litbrit.

And She Rubbed The Pot Roast All Over Her Chest

In addition to explaining the rather obvious problems with the claim that asking a question about the "Jessica Valenti breast controversy" is beyond the pale ("Ann then says that “It was character assassinating to talk about it like that.” Now, maybe I’m slow, but as far as I remember, Ann wrote a post about about Jessica’s breasts. The post was entitled “Let’s take a closer look at those breasts.” In the post, she refers to Feministing as a “breast blog.” Lots of comments ensued. Lots of other blogs picked up the post, and many were critical of Althouse. In other words, there was a controversy."), Jill gives us the perfect summary of the YouTube meltdown:

Which is one of the reasons that I don’t like Ann Althouse, so I don’t think Garance was all that far off. Well, Ann did not like that answer, and proceeds to completely flip her shit. You really have to watch it to understand. She starts yelling at Garance and shaking her finger, and tells her that “I don’t accept your saying the Jessica Valenti breast controversy. I consider that an insult. — You know, I’m on the verge of hanging up with you for bringing it up that way.”

The look on Garance’s face is priceless. It’s the same look that I probably had when a little girl I was nannying for decided to pee on the floor to get my attention.

Admittedly, for the analogy to be perfect the girl Jill was nannying for would have then berated Jill for assassinating her character by discussing the puddle on the floor rather than assessing the theories about Bill Clinton's murder of Vince Foster she was expounding at the time of the incident, but close enough to be the last word.

[Video by Chris Clarke.]

...no comment.

Whoa...

From Mr. Trend:

Viewers of a popular Portuguese television programme have voted dictator Antonio Salazar as "The Greatest Portuguese" by a wide margin, angering many of those who remember his repressive regime.

Salazar was chosen by 41 per cent of viewers, beating communist leader Alvaro Cunhal and historic figures such as Portugal's first king, D. Afonso Henriques, romantic poet Luis de Camoes and explorer Vasco da Gama, state broadcaster RTP said.

Whoa. But there's still some sense to be had:

"Only masochists, imbeciles or the insane could have voted for this executioner as the greatest Portuguese," wrote one viewer on the programme's website (www.rtp.pt).

"Let him remain where he is -- in the rubbish bin of history."

Another viewer had vowed to leave the country, one of western Europe's youngest democracies, if Salazar won the contest.

In mild defense of Portugal, the poll was not scientific. More from Randy.

The Lives of Others (multiple spoilers)

Finally saw The Lives of Others a couple weeks back. It's good, although not in the same class as Pan's Labyrinth, and it most certainly didn't deserve to beat the latter for the Best Foreign Language Oscar. The reviews I've read have ignored some pretty serious problems. When I got out of the movie, the first comparison that came to mind was American Beauty. The first time I saw AB I loved it; it was funny, smart, and well-acted. The second time I saw it I liked it a lot less, because it became apparent how badly the script treated Annette Bening's character. There were plenty of things wrong with the Spacey-Benning marriage, and while Bening was responsible for some of the problems, Spacey's character obviously deserved much of the blame. Spacey's efforts to escape were treated as light-hearted fancy, while Bening's were portrayed in a much darker light. There's nothing wrong with using characters as props; this is what minor characters are for, after all. Treating Bening as a prop, though, would have been an improvement. Instead, we were given just enough insight into her character to dislike her and hold her responsible for the collapse of the marriage and for Spacey's unhappiness, yet not quite enough to empathize with her position in the marriage.

I felt much the same way about Christa in The Lives of Others. She's more than a prop, but she's treated so unfairly by the script that the film suffers. Christa is asked to sacrifice a lot. First, she's given a choice between giving up her acting career and enduring what amounts to serial rape. She chooses her career, betraying her boyfriend at the same time. Later, she's given a choice between informing on her boyfriend and giving up her career. She chooses her career again. Her reward for this is to get hit by a truck. She's repeatedly compromised; giving in to a Central Committee member, lying to her boyfriend, informing on him, and lying to him again. She is forced to suffer these indignities not because of any political beliefs, but because she is a woman and an actress

Compare this treatment to that of the two main characters. Our hero, the author, is in good with the authorities of the GDR, so good that they need to fabricate evidence against him in order to damage his standing. About halfway through the film, a friend who's been blacklisted commits suicide; it's at this point that he notices that the GDR is bad. What sacrifice is he asked to make? What principles does he have to give up? What does he have to endure in order to keep doing the thing that he loves? Nothing, none, and nothing. He undergoes some mild inconvenience, and his girlfriend gets hit by a truck. Our other "hero" is a member of the Stasi. He presumably likes torturing people and certainly enjoys taking apart people's lives at the behest of the state. He listens to some music and realizes that the GDR is bad. What sacrifice is he asked to make? Like Christa, he's offered a trade between what he loves to do and obedience to the state. Unlike Christa, he sacrifices his job for his principles. Since, however, his job was to torture and spy on people, I can't feel a terrible lot of sympathy for him.

To recap, Sebastian (the author) is asked for no sacrifice and makes none. Gerd, the spy, gives up his job as a spy. Christa, on the other hand, is raped, forced to betray her boyfriend repeatedly, and run over by a truck. Now, maybe if a Central Committee member had offered Sebastian a trade of sex for protection he would have refused, and given up his art. We don't know, because he was never forced to make the choice. Maybe, if he'd been asked to report on his friends at cost of his art, he would have refused, but again we don't know because he was never forced to make the choice. We're allowed to revel in the heroism of both Gerd and Sebastian in standing up the machine, but when the bill comes due, Christa has to pay. Moroever, she doesn't even get the luxury of sacrificing herself for political principle; the state targets her because a Central Committee member wants to sleep with her. In the end, she's just a dead informer who was willing to have sex with a party member in order to keep her job.

The ending exacerbated the problem. While another director might have left unmentioned the impending collapse of the GDR, Donnersmarck decided to focus on it. Unfortunately, it serves to remind that, even if Sebastian or Gerd had been punished for holding to principle, the punishment would only have stuck for four years. Indeed, Gerd's punishment is to work in the Stasi mailroom between 1985 and 1989. Christa, however, remains dead. She pays for their sins, and not willingly. The end of the film, though, make clear that it was a movie about Gerd and Sebastian's reconciling with one another and with the state, and not a film about Christa. Yet, she bears virtually all of the weight of the film. Frankly, when I left the theater, I felt I'd been a bit cheated.

More On Quebec Nationalism and Secessionism

I can once again outsource follow-up commentary to Jacob Levy, whose views and experiences are similar to my own (although mine might be more intense since I was there during the last referendum. You might think that teaching Canadian politics would present few challenges other than keeping students awake, but mine got into a fistfight in the library elevator. And his are expressed in much better prose.) After some good stuff about the desirability of "normal politics" in Quebec, Jacob commented in the earlier thread:

I've been amazed at how much my basic indifference to Quebec secession (two liberal democracies or one, what's the difference?) has transformed into (stereotypical anglophone) antipathy toward the PQ since I moved to Montreal. It's not out of any affection for the territorial integrity of Canada: I really don't care about that as such. And it's not about a defense of the Montreal anglophones even though I'm now one of them-- I moved to another country, and perceive myself to have moved to a French-speaking country, deliberately moved to the Plateau in order to make the most of that move. I wanted to move to Montreal, regardless of whether that was in Canada or not. I just have the wrong upbringing to care about the Canada-shaped object on a map. Being an anglophone minority in a French-speaking society (independent or not) is what I signed up for.

But I do have real annoyance at the victimhood-and-bad-faith tales that I see the PQ using. The indivisibility-of-Quebec argument above all annoys the hell out of me-- my interest in indigenous rights is a lot older than my move to Montreal, and makes it very hard for me to be cheery about people who tell a straightforwardly hypocritical story about their own right to self-determination and the lack of same among the First Nations. As a secondary matter I genuinely perceive the PQ to be relevantly similar to the Jacobin laicite' tradition in France on matters of multiculturalism and minority religions. It somehow turns out that most of the ostensible hostility to religion falls on the shoulders of conservative Jews and Muslims, with very little falling on the giant cross looming over the city, or all the Christian holidays. And as a tertiary matter, while it's ordinary rent-seeking, I'm more than a little shocked at the 'fiscal imbalance' narrative as a justification for secession. Upshot: after nine months I've become utterly disgusted with the PQ and happy to see them lose. I'd have been very unhappy to see the ADQ win the election, but am pretty pleased with the outcome we got.

Right. The argument about Quebec's indivisibility really gives away the ethnic nationalist show (although, of course, many individual proponents of secession are liberal progressives.) I have no particular attachment to arbitrary national boundaries, but the current post-Quiet Revolution secessionist movement is premised on all kinds of bad faith. And not only is the fiscal imbalance argument the kind of dishonesty people will recognize from the American south (Quebec is actually gets a net fiscal gain from the federal government), it's a fundamental part of many "sovereignty-association" schemes, which seem to involve Quebec retaining all powers except those that involve the ability of the federal government to transfer money to Quebec. There just aren't any arguments about why secession is necessary that work without ethnic nationalism.

In response to Matt, I would say that the kind of social democracy advocated by the PQ is only half-appealing, particularly given the much different political context than the U.S. (even in Alberta, you can't run against the fundamentals of single-payer.) The Quebec left supports the robuset European welfare model that I support, but also some elements of European dirigisme that I'm more more skeptical about. I will concede, though, that Dumont is pretty awful.

UPDATE: John dissents.

It's Not Personal, Sonny

I have no particular desire to revisit the issue, and indeed have every intention of continuing my post-Pelosi-smear policy of ignoring her except for MSM appearances or unusual circumstances such as her bullying a colleague, but since Garance has implied here that there's some sort of mutual personal grudge between me and Ann Althouse I suppose I have to clarify something. I invite anyone to click on the link and look at what I've written -- you'll see nothing remotely resembling the kind of genuinely personal insults Althouse has directed at me or Glenn Greenwald (among many others.) I criticize Althouse a lot because she happens to combine in one package several of the most annoying and most pernicious types of punditry: "Everything changed for me on September 11. I used to consider myself a Democrat, but thanks to 9/11, I’m outraged by Chappaquiddick" fake moderation, obsession with meaningless trivia and junior-high-school personality narratives when discussing politics, and crying "civility" to pre-empt your vicious smears form any scrutiny. But whether you agree or disagree, these are things I consistently believe to be odious irrespective of the party involved. If you look at most of the things I've criticized her for -- completely undefended assertions that Sam Alito is a moderate, apologizing for the Bush administration's foreign policy (including its assertions of arbitrary power and use of torture), claiming the Iraq War is rationally seen as part of a conflict with Islamic terrorism, repeating lies about Nancy Pelosi requesting a luxury jet -- you'll find that I've criticized other people who have made similar arguments. Admittedly, some of her arguments are sui generis, so you're just going to have to take my word that I would find claims that liberals opposition to Sam Alito reflected their belief that people don't have rights, or that New York's most prominent feminist blogger was invited to a meeting by Hillary Clinton's campaign as part of an elaborate ruse to get Bill Clinton some action equally idiotic if someone else made them. I don't think this is much of a stretch.

Of course, saying that this is all about a personality clash, in addition to being an almost comically transparent case of projection (and her meltdown in the face of Garance's mild questions is just the latest example), is also yet another clever strategy for insulating her silly arguments from any criticism on the merits. People criticize her not because they disagree, but because they're been "sucked into the Althouse vortex" or some such nonsense. This her way of seeing the world, not mine. And in fairness, given the quality of the arguments Althouse would have to try to defend, you can't really blame her for using various diversions to avoid having to do so. Don't buy it.

In Defense of Jacques Lemaire

Looking at the boxscore, you might think that last night's Flames/Wild game was a throwback to the worst of the early-aughts NHL. But you would be quite wrong. It was a terrific game: fast, plenty of chances, great goaltending. As long as the league is enforcing the anti-obstruction rules, looking at total goals scored is the wrong metric to evaluate the quality of play. All of which reminds me that I've always thought that Lemaire's great Devils teams always got a bad rap. There certainly were teams of that era that tried to win through tedious clutch-and-grabbing, but the Devils were an exciting, hard-hitting, highly skilled team that happened to specialize in defense and goaltending. If you don't allow goals because you're fast and well-coached, that's still fun to watch. The other good thing about the game is that the Flames had been so bad in shootouts it was difficult for me to argue against them without seeming to be acting out of self-interest, but now that we've won a few in a row I'm free to reiterate what an abomination they are.

Also, for Brad, Darcy et al. allow me to graciously congratulate the Pigfuckers Canucks on clinching a playoff spot.

Fifteen

I also find the British claims as to the location of their sailors and marines a bit more compelling than the Iranian; the Iranians changed their story about the location after the British pointed out that the first Iranian claimed location was, in fact, in Iraqi waters after all. But whether the sailors were in either Iranian or Iraqi waters is a bit beside the point. The border between Iran and Iraq in this area is confusing and oft-disputed, and arresting the British sailors in disputed waters is not an appropriate reaction even to what may have been a small incursion. Especially since Iran is not contesting the basic British account (that the sailors and marines were investigating an Indian merchant ship), the arrest and detention would be a major over-reaction if it happened anywhere else in the world.

It seems obvious to me that the arrests are intended to be seen as a political response to US detention of Iranians in Iraq, and perhaps as a means of embarassing the Blair government. The method of capture (several Iranian boats acting in concert) would seem to support this. The byzantine nature of the Iranian state leaves in question who, precisely, intends to send what political message. The entire situation is worrying, though, because this is hardly the time for Tehran to act recklessly against the major US ally. The drumbeat of war against Iran has slowed in the last few months, and since I don't want war I would prefer that Tehran refrain from presenting convenient casus belli. Unfortunately, Iran also has a Dick Cheney, a Don Rumsfeld, and a Bill Kristol; men who believe that the "enemy" understands only force, and who habitually underestimate the costs of such an approach.

The Boy Who Cried Lieberman

Nice to see Lieberman admit he's been straightforwardly lying for years about Iraq as he used it to slander his ex-party mates. One day some members of the Connecticuit electorate may wake up and say, "my god, what have I done?"

I Picked the Right Faux-Centrist Hack...

I'm glad that MY enemy is Mickey Kaus, and not Ann Althouse. Garance:

After the episode, Althouse brought another controversy to my attention, in the shape of a rather nasty personal spat between herself and Scott Lemieux, with whom she apparently has a long-standing beef. So between Ezra’s prior comments at his personal site about the Jessica Valenti episode and the thing with Lemieux, I suspect that’s what she was talking about when she raised the topic of my co-writers at Tapped, and then her voice.

Mickey, as I've noted before, has always been quite a good sport regarding criticism from LGM. Indeed, last Bloggingheads he described me as an "enefren", which is, I think, more or less the same as a "frenemy." Even if Bob Wright thinks my name is "McFarley".

Abortion? Not-abortion? Either Way, As Long As Yong Women in Unstable Families Are Placed In Danger!

Ann -- the actual feminist one, I mean -- has a good discussion of recent events in North Dakota. In addition to a draconian abortion ban that would be triggered if Roe is overturned, the legislature failed to pass a law that would guarantee teens the right to seek prenatal care. Ann explains the issue:

Conservatives are wailing that explicitly stating there is no parental notification requirement would "drive a wedge between the daughter and the parents." But isn't it obvious that, if a young woman has chosen to carry her pregnancy to term without telling her parents, she most likely has a compelling reason for keeping them in the dark? And if a teenage girl faces very little support at home for keeping her pregnancy -- which, presumably, is the reason she would keep this info from her parents -- then you would think anti-abortion activists would be in favor of this legislation. After all, they love to publicize cases where parents have coerced their daughters into abortions. You would think that this legislation would prevent that from happening.

Seeing as how the pro-choice movement is actually pro-choice, not pro-abortion (as the antis love to characterize us), we can agree it's bad for parents to force their daughters into abortions AND bad to force them to carry an unwanted pregnancy to term.

The disconnect in requiring parental notification for abortion but not for prenatal care has long been pointed out as part of the legal rhetoric opposing laws that meddle with teens' reproductive rights. A Guttmacher Policy Review article from 2000 found no states that require parental consent or notification for teens to receive prenatal care, whereas more than 20 required it for abortion.

Right. Teenagers should be permitted to choose abortion, and they should also be guaranteed medical care if they choose to carry their pregnancies to term.

Quebec Election Blogging

Ah, you always have to like it when the ethnic nationalist secessionists finish third. I hope Pithlord will follow up; I'd be interested to know if Charest and Dumont can make it a relatively stable coalition.

...in response to comments, this should not be seen as an endorsement of Dumont per se, who I agree is a highly problematic figure. Laura is certainly correct that this is a collection of bad choices. But until secessionism is off the table, these bad choices are inevitable, and even Dumont's better than the PQ.

The Dreamlife of Narcissists

Taunted? She has a richly detailed fantasy life, you have to give her that. In a week she'll be talking about how GFR threatened her with physical violence and how TAPPED blogs about nothing but breasts...

...Alterman has more background. It would be one thing if she refused to discuss the matter entirely, but she's happy to discuss it with people who won't challenge her.

Craziness Concealing Revisionism

Ann Althouse gets livid at Garance Franke-Ruta over nothing. At one point, she threatens to hang up. She's become such a pathetic figure that it's almost painful to watch. (UPDATE: C&L; excerpts a section here. Dave has the full transcript of the segment with commentary.)

Garance is understandably surprised that Althouse would go into an incoherent rage because she brings up the Valenti incident (make sure to scroll down to Althouse's own comments, including such knee-slappers as "Jessica should have worn a beret. Blue dress would have been good too"), since she had apparently discussed it the previous week with Glenn Reynolds and Dr. Helen. But this isn't really surprising -- she's constructed a very carefully sanitized ex post facto version of this incident, and she's not going to engage the merits with anybody who might remember it or who might challenge her version of events. (It is worth noting that it was Althouse who first brought up the "breastblogging" accusation, so it was hardly out of bounds for Garance to describe the incident the way she did.) I won't fully rehash the events (I discussed it in detail here and here), but obviously her claim that her attack on Jessica was about how some bloggers "lacked the feminist grit to object to what Clinton meant for feminism" is farcical. It's highly unpersuasive on its face to claim that a feminist can have absolutely nothing to do with a President with a relatively good record on woman's rights because of a consensual (though potentially objectionable from a feminist perspective) affair. But coming from someone who strongly supports George Bush and Sam Alito's nomination to the Supreme Court, this absolutism is laughable. Is feminism served by appointing a staunch opponent of woman's rights who boasted about his membership in a group that wanted to keep women out of Princeton? Or by a President who would institute a global gag rule in his first day of office, appoint people like David Hager to important positions, appoint people like Altio and Priscilla Owen to the federal courts, etc etc.? This wasn't about feminist principle; this was about someone obsessed with The Clenis and with a well-documented resentment toward liberal feminists taking a cheap shot that she was rightly called on.

Anyway, as a public service to counteract her revisionism I thought I would transcribe a relevant portion of "Audible Althouse 65," (seriously, you owe me for this) in which she discussed the incident. If you go to about 20 minutes in, you'll get some instructive comments. She first of all claims, erroneously, that Feministing is "sexed up with pictures of women in bras" and "talks about breasts a lot." (She engaged in a vicious attack on a blogger, on other words, without the slightest idea what the hell she was talking about.) Her outrage over Garance's description of the incident is particularly amusing when you hear how often she asserts her imaginary claims about Feministing being dominated by breast images. Then, 35 minutes in, after her speculations trying to explain the deep, deep puzzle of why someone would take a picture with the taller people in the back and the shorter people in the front, you get this (the transcription is not perfectly word for word):

Now why they brought in this woman with the breasts all over her blog [sic], I don't know....now, obviously, you could come up with a theory that Clinton actually wanted to meet her....I think her blog has a lot less traffic than the other bloggers, and the name of her blog is "Feminsiting," which I think is pretty clearly a portmanteau word combines the words "feminist" and "fisting," (!) so it's a graphic sexual image. And then there are all these breast images on the blog too [sic]. I don't really know why you would want to bring that in and connect it up with Clinton. I mean, the sort of Occam's Razor, the simplest explanation, is that Clinton actually wanted to meet this woman.

Yes, the most straightforward explanation for the fact that a campaign event associated with Hillary Clinton would want to bring in a prominent feminist blogger (and NARAL's house blogger) is...that Bill Clinton wanted to get laid! And if you describe utterly banal T-Shirt ads of the type found on many blogs across the ideological spectrum (combined with an obvious parody of sexist mudflaps) as "sexualized images," it all becomes clear! Yes, I can't imagine why this serious nonpartisan thinker and principled feminist is such a object of contempt and derision.

A Solemn LGM Endorsement

Although Lawyers, Guns and Money does not typically make endorsements in University of California-Berkeley student elections, the strong qualifications of one candidate in particular have come to my attention. Eric Marshall, candidate, is distinguished by his commitment to strong, competent leadership with the highest of professional standards, and by the fact that I know his sister. A vote against Eric Marshall should be considered a vote against fresh ideas for positive change. Listen to these endorsements:

"My brother would make a much better president than Charlton Heston, for the record."- Kate Marshall

"Eric Martin is unequalled in general awesomeness. I mean Eric Marshall, that is. I suppose Eric Martin is cool, too."- Robert Farley

Seriously, though, Eric's website looks good; he has some good ideas, especially about access and accountability. I have no doubt that he would do an exceptional job for the Berkeley student body.

Where the Frak is My Frakking Actium?!!?!? (Spoiler Alert!)

So, I wait for two seasons and get all of two crappy battle scenes. I wait, because I know that they'll do a good Actium; how could they not do a good Actium? It's such a cinematic battle, with the ships and the fire and the Antony and the Cleopatra and the general awesomeness of a clash that would help set the course of the Mediterranean world for the next 400 years. What do I get? A couple ships burning in the distance, and a depressed Mark Antony blathering about it's not so bad to lose epic historical battles.

On the other hand, it's clear that Caesar Augustus would make a better President than G.W. Bush: "We need to keep the Egyptian people quiet. I suspect that destroying the Royal Palace with their Queen inside might make them peevish."

Baseball Challenge '07

On the heels of the disastrous collapse of my NCAA Tournament entry, I have created a league for this year's Baseball Challenge.

ESPN Baseball Challenge
League Name: Lawyers, Guns and Money
Password: zevon

Let it Rain

Let's hope it doesn't rain when the North Koreans and Iranians attack us with their ballistic missiles:

Torrential rains wiped out a quarter of the U.S.' intercontinental ballistic missile interceptors in Ft. Greely, Alaska last summer -- right when North Korea was preparing to carry out an advanced missile launch, according to documents obtained by the Project On Government Oversight.

"The flooding occurred during a three-week period between the end of June and early July 2006," POGO notes, in a statement. "The flooding damaged 25% of the U.S. interceptor missiles’ launch capability. These silos house the interceptor missiles that would be used to attempt to intercept a missile aimed at the United States. No interceptors were in the flooded silos."

Noah (really, could this story have a more appropriately dubbed author?) puts it aptly:

What exactly are we getting, for the $9 billion a year we're paying for missile defense? And why can't it take a little rain?

Cross-posted to Tapped.

Berube? Making Sense?

The injunction, critical to the 2003 debate over the invasion of Iraq, that we ought to treat with the BEST arguments of either side rather than the worst was critical to my own opposition to the war. In the months preceding the Iraq War there were tremendously bad anti-war arguments coming from some elements of the left, just as there were awfully bad pro-war argument coming from the right. A lot of the really bad left arguments had to do with a curious worship of the norm of sovereignty, a position that's never made any sense to me. I suspect that trouble getting past this was what stopped a fair number of leftish sorts from seeing the even greater stupidity of the pro-war contingent. Berube explains...

In the wake of Kosovo, the Sovereignty Left and the Liberal Hawks produced each other. In the US, the Z/Counterpunch crew have a symbiotic relation to Berman, Hitchens, et al., just as in the UK the Galloway/Respect crowd have a symbiotic relation to the Eustonites. To this day, each needs the other. And it is in both camps’ interest to pretend that Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq were all part of the same enterprise: all three wars were wars of liberation for the Hawks, and all three were exercises in imperialism for the Sovereignty Left. The Hawks wound up agreeing, in whole or in part, with Bush’s premise that Iraq was the next logical front in the War on Terror. And the Sovereignty Left has never quite explained what American empire was established in the Balkans, and they’ve never quite explained why they opposed the Taliban from 1996 to 2001 but opposed the Taliban’s removal after al-Qaeda’s strikes against the US. But both groups share the common goal of aligning supporters of war in Kosovo and Afghanistan with supporters of war in Iraq.

Read the whole thing. I've never quite thought of it that way, and it makes sense. As for Michael's more specific points about Noam Chomsky, I recall that Loomis and I had a discussion about him a while back, and to paraphrase Erik a bit (and I'll give Erik free rein to claim that I'm misrepresting his comments), he said that he kind of wished Noam would be the next in the Horowitz/Hitchens genre; we'd be better off on the left if Noam just switched teams. I wouldn't go quite that far, because while much of Noam's work is awfully bad, a good portion is valuable. I also don't think I could stand all the attention that he would receive for such a switch...

...mildly edited.

Prison Reform and the PLRA

I strongly recommend reading this post about the Prison Litigation Reform Act, which makes it more difficult for prisoners to sue and reduces the scope of potential litigation in ways that enable appalling prison conditions to continue. This is particularly problematic because (due to prisoners' evident lack of political clout) prison reform has always been a litigation-driven exercise, as Feeley and Rubin have explained in great detail. Limiting prisoner's right to sue in this manner is effectively the equivalent of sanctioning substantial amounts of abuse; hopefully Congress will amend some of the bad effects of PLRA. The SAVE coalition has a list or recommendations with other useful resources here.

UPDATE: See also this ACS paper explaining how to close the loophole the legislation created for rapists.

Letters to the Editor

From Life magazine, 26 September 1955, weeks after massive Arab revolts in Tunisia, Morocco and Algeria -- and a corresponding wave of French colonial violence -- claimed nearly 1000 lives across North Africa:

Sirs:
I applaud the French retaliation against the tribal forces. To withdraw colonial conditions could only lead to chaos. A logical mind doesn't combat such movements toward home rule with words and promises, but with guns and military supplies.

R.H. Gerding
St. Louis, MO

***

Sirs:
Having lived in North africa, I can attest to the vast amount of good that France has done in that area. France has a thankless task, but is standing up to its share.

H. I. Schneider
Whitter, CA

Clearly, I need to stop reading my mother-in-law's old copies of Life magazine and start enjoying my first trip to Arizona.

The Most Indefensible Comment in the History of Human Discourse

Labs has found it: "My own favorite meeting moment came when an old dude at a large faculty meeting said that we should have more meetings." I support the institution of tenure as much as anybody, but I can fully get behind revoking it for anyone who suggests increasing the number of meetings out of general principle.

What Market Forces?

To follow up on Atrios' point, it seems worth noting the newspaper situation here in one of the nation's most liberal cities (my borough, which Kerry won 72-27, is conservative by New York standards), our dailies include the New York Times, with a moderate-left op-ed page (featuring at least one regular conservative columnist). OK. Then you have the Wall Street Journal, whose op-ed pages are a fount of entirely unleavened wingnuttery. And the New York Post, which to borrow a friend's line is not so much a newspaper as a social meance. And The Daily News, which endorsed Bush in 2004. And The New York Sun, which you'll like if you think it's a good idea to have an entire newspaper written like the WSJ's editorial pages. Even if you count Newsday as a New York paper, that's two liberal op-ed pages out of six. Moreover, the comparative ideologies aren't commensurate -- can you imagine the Wall Street Journal joining in an endless attack on Bush based on trumped-up pseudo-scandals, as the Times did against Clinton in the 90s? Is there any equivalent in the Times of the Journal implying that Clinton was involved in drug-running? At any rate, it's pretty clear that the reactionary tenor of the city's op-ed pages, far from playing to market forces, is cutting against them. (In its last audited circulation, The Sun had a circulation of 18,000.) Just as Olbermann proves that the exclusion of liberals from cable news was never just about market forces.

Hillary: Hawk

We know Clinton's positions have been more hawkish than her rivals (marginally so than Edwards, much more so than Obama.) It would, as Michael Crowley suggests, seem worthwhile to compare her advisers as well:

Hillary Clinton still talks regularly with her husband's senior foreign policy team, whose generally hawkish slant may help to explain why Hillary has been far slower than her Democratic rivals to shift left on the war. (It's telling that the three well-known former Clinton foreign policy officials who have signed up with Obama's campaign--former National Security Advisor Anthony Lake, State Department African affairs expert Susan Rice, and Greg Craig, a lawyer and onetime adviser to Albright--are more dovish than many of their old colleagues.) Hillary's campaign still lacks a formally structured foreign policy team, perhaps in part because her lasting personal friendships provide much of the advice she needs. A month after Hillary's election to the Senate in 2000, for instance, Holbrooke hosted a gala dinner for her at his private residence in Manhattan's Waldorf Astoria Towers, featuring attendees like Robert DeNiro and Harrison Ford. When Hillary traveled to Munich in 2005 for a speech about the United Nations, Holbrooke was there, taking notes in the front row. He's also inside enough to have recently solicited recommendations for a new full-time foreign policy aide to join Clinton's campaign. "He's obviously gunning for secretary of state," a Democratic foreign policy expert told me. "He's putting all his eggs in this basket."

[...]

Newer additions to Hillary's fold also suggest that her hawkish profile is about more than just polls. One is her Senate foreign policy staffer Andrew Shapiro. The 39-year-old Shapiro is affable but charged with nervous energy. (Sitting in the audience at a recent Clinton speech on the military, he rocked steadily back and forth like Rain Man at Wapner time.) A Gore-Lieberman campaign aide and Justice Department lawyer, Shapiro was also briefly a research assistant at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a center-right think tank. Shapiro is "a mainstream foreign Democratic policy establishment moderate," says a congressional foreign policy aide. "He's hawkish on defense issues and Israel." It is Shapiro, Hillaryites say, who is in the room for most of her important foreign policy decisions.

He has a lot more. As I've said before, trying to establish whether her support of the Iraq War was "calculating" or "sincere" is on some level beside the point; it's not as if political conditions would somehow vanish if she got elected (although, since foreign policy tends to produce more sui generis problems, I suppose it's slightly more relevant than with domestic policy.) But I think the evidence is overwhelming that her foreign policy is likely to be substantially more "hawkish" than Obama's.

[Via Yglesias, who has another excerpt here.]

The Imperial Purple

In honor of the Rome series finale tonight, which will quite likely (spoiler!!!!) end in the founding of the Empire by Augustus. While Rome has worked fairly well on an episode-by-episode basis this year, the telescoped schedule has taken a severe toll on the story. For example, Caesarion looked much older that Vorenus' son Lucius in Rome, despite the fact that Lucius must have been born sometime around 50 BCE and Caesarion was born in 47. The show needed at least one more season to work properly. I suppose that the alternative would have been to take the Deadwood approach and simply ignore the impending end, but this probably would have worked even less well for Marc Antony than it did for Al Swearingen...

Anyway, I'm not so displeased by Hadrian, atlhough I would have preferred Pius or Claudius or Nerva. I would further add that a preference for boys does not necessarily make succession crises any easier to deal with...

You scored as Hadrian. You are the great emperor Hadrian. Not only great for the fact that he didn't mess something up, but he relentlessly administered the empire and set viable borders. Art, cultivation and wisdom mark your reign. The fact that you prefer the boys really helps with the wise handing over of the purple to only the most qualified.
Which Roman Emperor Are You?

Tales of the Sea: The Aftermath

Part I: HMAS Sydney

Part II: HSK Kormoran

Part III: Sydney vs. Kormoran

An explanation of what happened to HMAS Sydney needs to fulfill three requirements. First, how did Kormoran defeat Sydney? Second, why were there no survivors from Sydney? Finally, why has the story given by the crew of Kormoran not changed substantially in the last sixty years? The German story of Sydney's end gives answers to the first two questions that are on the margins of plausibility, but can answer the third quite effectively. Wesley Olson makes probably the most plausible possible interpretation of the German case in Bitter Victory, a case summarized here. Nevertheless, other narratives of Sydney's end have been developed.

Some argue that the Kormoran must have made a false surrender to HMAS Sydney, then attacked when Sydney approached to accept the surrender.* This tactic is, of course, impermissible under maritime law, and would likely have resulted in the prosecution of the captain and crew of Kormoran for piracy. A false surrender would make the explanation of Sydney's destruction somewhat more plausible, and she might have been even less prepared against the onslaught of Kormoran than can otherwise be accounted for. On the other hand, it's difficult to believe that the Captain of HMAS Sydney would have dropped his guard against even a surrendered Kormoran; Sydney would almost certainly have been prepared for German treachery. However, if a false surrender was given, the elimination of Sydney's crew makes sense, as any survivors would have revealed the inaccuracy of German claims. Finally, although I can believe that Kormoran's crew would have stayed on message during the war and even in the immediate post-war period, it strains credulity to think that the 300 or so survivors would never have revealed the truth of the incident in the 66 years since the incident.

Others have argued that a Japanese submarine assisted Kormoran in the destruction of HMAS Sydney. Presumably, the Japanese vessel would have come to the assistance of Kormoran during the battle against Sydney. As Japan was not yet at war with either Australia or the United Kingdom, the execution of any Sydney survivors would have been necessary in order to preserve secrecy. Partisans of this theory have further argued that, as this would have represented a war crime, that the absence of any evidence in Japanese records of such an attack is not proof that the attack did not occur. This does not explain, however, why no one from the crew of Kormoran has come forward to confirm this account. It cannot plausibly be argued that the crew of Kormoran would feel partial enough to Imperial Japan to conceal the Japanese attack for over sixty years.

The fate of the sailor who washed up on Christmas Island has some bearing on our conclusions. Ballistic tests on the metal piece found in his skull now indicate that it is probably a shell fragment, rather than a bullet. This suggests that the sailor (if he was a crew member of HMAS Sydney), may have abandoned ship prior to the final destruction of the Sydney, and then been killed by a fragment from a successful Kormoran shot. The sailor may also have been dead or mortally wounded before being placed in the life raft. It seems unlikely, though, that large caliber weapons would have been used by either the Germans or the Japanese against any survivors of Sydney.

The search for the wreck of HMAS Sydney continues. If discovered, the wreck will undoubtedly yield some clues as to what happened. Our understanding of the fate of HMS Hood, for example, has been made much more complete by an examination of her remains. The lack of torpedo hits would support the Japanese submarine theory, for example. Evidence of a magazine explosion would might help explain why no survivors were found. However, it's unlikely that the wreck will answer all questions about the fate of the Australian light cruiser.

*It should be noted that Admiral James T. Kirk of the USS Enterprise used this tactic against foes in two consecutive Star Trek films. In Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Kirk ordered a false surrender to the USS Reliant, then commanded by Khan Noonien Singh. As Khan himself was, at the time, unquestionably a pirate operating outside of interstellar law, Kirk's tactic was probably legitimate. Indeed, Khan himself pointed out that he could give no guarantee that the surrender would be honored. In Star Trek III, Admiral Kirk again made a false surrender, sabotaging the Enterprise in order to kill the crew of a Klingon Bird of Prey. In this instance, Admiral Kirk's false surrender was clearly an act of piracy. Moreover, Admiral Kirk had stolen USS Enterprise from Starfleet Command, and launched an unprovoked attack against the Klingon Bird of Prey. Kirk was fortunate not to be brought up on charges of piracy while in Klingon custody during the Gorkon Affair.

The Eastwood Myth

I can't discuss his take on Letters From Iwo Jima, which I haven't seen, but I think Charles Taylor has a good take on Clint Eastwood here. I didn't know that A.O. Scott -- who I think is an excellent critic -- had argued that with the passing of Altman Eastwood was America's greatest filmmaker, but as I've argued before I think that's crazy. More controversially, I pretty much agree with his take on Unforgiven too:

That's a depressing prospect: It's as if, with Altman's maverick crapshoot approach to filmmaking out of the way, American movies can return to the static genre familiarity that his films made look unutterably square.

Eastwood's films -- in which well-worn genre conventions are rendered with the slow, heavy solemnity that is often taken as a signal that art is being committed -- offer the comfort of seeing B-movie tropes become respectable objects of critical contemplation. For all the talk of Eastwood's originality, nearly everything he has gotten credit for as a director has been done before, and done better, by other filmmakers -- filmmakers who may have won some critical favor in retrospect, but who have never managed the transition to respectability that Eastwood has.

The moral complications that his Unforgiven supposedly injected into Westerns, for instance, were present in the 1950s Westerns directed by Anthony Mann and Budd Boetticher (to say nothing of the later work of Sam Peckinpah). Eastwood's lumbering, inflated Million Dollar Baby couldn't match the sweat-and-liniment haze of small-time boxing captured so indelibly by Robert Wise in his 1949 film, The Set-Up. And you can find some of what Eastwood is getting at in his currently playing Flags of Our Fathers (the movie that, along with Letters From Iwo Jima, comprises his World War II diptych) in Mann's Men in War (1957) and in Samuel Fuller's grungy combat films like Fixed Bayonets! (1951)

Right. It's certainly not that Eastwood lacks talent, and Mystic River proves that solemn and middlebrow can be perfectly effective if executed well. Unforgiven is a good picture, a very well- turned and entertaining genre piece, but claims about its originality are indeed absurd. Gender switch or no gender switch, however, the sheer density of cliches in Million Dollar Baby becomes intolerable, especially given how leaden and pretentious it is. But it's not just that his best movies aren't nearly as good as Scorsese's best, say, it's that he's made movies that Joel Schumacher would be reluctant to sign for -- not only is Absolute Power risibly bad, it doesn't fail in the interesting way one might expect from our Greatest Living Filmmaker. I don't really understand the magnitude of the praise being heaped on him.

Clinton and Gender

I should say that I take a somewhat more charitable view of what GFR is arguing than Matt does here. I don't think she's arguing that I oppose Clinton because I'm a man in some reductive sense. Rather, as I read her she's claiming that 1)the male dominated pundit class is not likely to have representative views of what Democrats think of Clinton, and 2)people's judgments can never be fully abstracted from their social circumstances. Both of these points are, I think, correct. How would I evaluate Clinton if I had experienced an enormous amount of sexism in my life? I have no idea. I make the best judgments I can based on what I know, but that's not an all-seeing or infallible perspective (to put it mildly.)

Having said that, I endorse the rest of Matt's post. Yes, Clinton is infinitely preferable to any possible Republican nominee. Absolutely, liberals should counter the inevitable deranged media and conservative attacks (whatever combination of sexism, obsession with her husband, and the general triviality of our political discourse) that Clinton has likely to face. But none of this means that she should get the nomination. As Matt says, "In Clinton's case, you would need to convince me that there are some important issues where she's likely to make a better president than would the available alternatives, and/or that she has some clear electability edges. And I don't really see it." On both metrics, I think she's clearly worse than Edwards or Obama, and compared to Richardson is no better on substance and less electable. And it's worth noting that, despite a few bits and pieces here and there, Garance hasn't made this case either. We may all be missing something, but it's up to Clinton's defenders to make the case.

Viva Raul...

The 2007 Patterson School Spring Simulation is (finally) over. High points:

• Fidel kicks the bucket
• US Ambassador to OAS declares Raul Castro dead
  
• Canadian Ambassador to Cuba expelled
• USS John F. Kennedy sinks
  (or maybe not)
• "Freedom Flotilla" leaves Miami for Cuba
• US Ambassador to OAS relieved of duties
  
• Raul Castro takes extended vacation in Venezuela

Altogether, just over eighty blog posts from four different writers at five blogs over the course of 24 hours. Good times.

Cuba News Agency
INN Worldwide
Man About Havana
Caribbean News Network
Office of OAS Secretary General

Stating What I Hope Is Obvious

"It's not comedy that's in my blood. It's selling out!"

The editors of Lawyers, Guns & Money do not necessarily endorse the sentiments of all of our fine advertisers. On an entirely unrelated note, I thought this post was interesting.

One more reason to hate meetings

Ugh.

I've been wracking my brain for about 15 minutes now, trying to think of the most idiotic thing I've ever heard uttered in a meeting (excluding my own bovine contributions). But given the fact that I tend to sit through most meetings with calliope music and images of dancing pandas running through my brain, I'm not sure I have any real memories to retrieve.

Judgment

Matt is right about this. In addition to the fact that it's contrary to progressive interests to have Penn advising people, there's the additional issue of what it says about Clinton's priorities that she would hire him in the first place. Clinton wants her head pollster to be somebody whose specialty is giving catchy names to wholly arbitrary groups of affluent people as a justification for throwing progressive policy initiatives under the bus. This says something important about her judgment, and what it says is obviously not good.

Friday Cat (Power) Blogging

Doughbob

The latest dustup over Liberal Fascism is quite the howler. The delay is amusing enough, but Goldberg -- who can't seem to shake that Barton Fink feeling -- is now defending himself by claiming that he's been really . . . like . . . busy, or something.

As my wife, various friends and colleagues and sundry others can attest, the book is delayed because it's not done yet. The reasons for that have to do with any number of things (revisions, work distractions, my father's death, the birth of my child, etc etc) and, as far as I'm aware, marketing isn't even on the top ten.

Now, I can empathize with the obstacles to genius that clutter the daily life of Mr. Loadpants -- I'd be so much more productive, for example, if I weren't staggering under the oppressive demands of work or dealing with my child's unending state of self-interest. Moreover, my father has cancer, my dogs aren't getting walked enough, and my quest to master the knuckleball and make a run at the major leagues has hit a number of snags I'd just rather not discuss publicly. All of this is making me quite stressed out and tired and unproductive.

All that aside, I'm also self-depreciating enough not to suggest that anything I do represents "a very serious, thoughtful, argument that has never been made in such detail or with such care." And unlike Jonah Goldberg, I don't claim to be composing a Significant Political Analysis of Libero-Fascism while dicking around and linking to games like "Pac Man with Guns." Honestly, I'd find Goldberg's lack of productivity more plausible if I thought he were spending his days wrestling John Goodman in a LA hotel room and walking around with Judy Davis' head in a box.

Anti-Choice Wedges and Bribes

Prof. B has a good post about the strange plan in Texas to pay $500 to have babies and give them for adoption. She hits the most obvious problem: Honey, $500 isn't even going to pay for the extra groceries you'll eat during a pregnancy. Let alone the prenatal care, if you're not insured or on Medicaid, or the cost of the birth. Senator Patrick, would you agree to take care of a neighbor's dog for nine months for a measly $500?"

So, yeah, that doesn't seem likely to change much behavior. But there's also a practical problem with the law: how do you know they were going to get an abortion? Give application forms only at clinics. But how do you know they really wanted an abortion and weren't just coming to get the 500 bucks? You get the idea.

This kind of thing often happens the other way, as forced pregnancy advocates come up with various wedges to try to water down abortion rights. "But what if abortion is used as sex selection? To kill fetuses with the gay gene?" Back when we had abortion trolls, they often brought it up as if it were definitive objections. The problem is, though, that even if these choices are always immoral there's no way these distinctions can be drawn in legislative enactments. Once you assume that most women will be smart enough to lie or stay quiet if asked their motives, how do you prove that women are getting abortions for bad reasons? Presumably, one suspects, by creating doctor panels, which given the impossibility of evidence in most cases will be ineluctably arbitrary. The choice, as always, is really simple: ban all abortions, or trust women with the ability to make choices (understanding that some will be ones you wouldn't agree with.) The criminal law is too crude too accommodate efforts to ensure that abortions are obtained for specific reasons, even if we could agree on what they are.

On Elizabeth Edwards

Most of what I had to say I already said yesterday, so I think I'll outsource the rest to Jane Hamsher. I only hope that in a similar situation I would have a fraction of the courage that either possesses. You can see the press conference here.

Pride goeth before the fall

John Bolton cements his reputation as one of the most loathsome human beings on the planet:

Mr Bolton now describes it as "perfectly legitimate... and good politics" for the Israelis to seek to defeat their enemy militarily, especially as Hezbollah had attacked Israel first and it was acting "in its own self-defence".

Mr Bolton, a controversial and blunt-speaking figure, said he was "damned proud of what we did" to prevent an early ceasefire.

I suppose it's telling that Bolton would regard as "good politics" a war that turned out to be a humanitarian catastrophe for Lebanon and a political catastrophe for Israel; I would be keen to hear Bolton's account of what, precisely, the United States gained by thwarting any effort to achieve the only decent solution to last summer's war. As for the matter of Bolton's pride, it seems to me that "damned" is the operant word.






. . . Loomis has more . . .

and Bolton's #1 Fan is breathless with glee . . .

"Argumentum Ad Patchouli"

Indeed.

I suppose it's not literally true that no genre of blogging is less likely to produce anything of interest or value as the typical Trainwreck Media blogger: i.e. Yoosta Bees whose banal tendency to get more reactionary as they get older and wealthier was accelerated by post 9/11 bedwetting (which, even worse, convinced them that bog-standard conservative politics represented some kind of incredibly earth-shattering insight). But I'm inclined to say it anyway.

Cathy Seipp

The conservative blogger has died after what by all accounts was an immensely courageous 5-year battle with lung cancer. My father's mother (who, incidentally, was also not a smoker) passed away from lung cancer when he was 13, which is a powerful reminder to me that this could happen to anyone. R. I. P.

Mystery And Misery

The main question about this upcoming Edwards press conference would seem to be how awful it's going to be; I certainly hope fervently that the news will be more benign than seems likely. Even if Elizabeth is ill once again, I'm not sure that it will end John's campaign--every family is different, of course, but I wouldn't want my unfortunate hypothetical spouse to put off a pursuit of her dream job to care for me full-time almost no matter how sick I was (although a presidential campaign is evidently pretty sui generis in terms of the time it takes away from family.) Anyway, I'm not going to even think about how this will affect the race until we know about Elizabeth's health. Let's hope she's well.

...doesn't seem promising.

No Inconsistency

I probably shouldn't dabble in theology, but this contradiction doesn't seem like much of a contradiction:

But once you recognize homosexuality as a genetic reality, it does create a theological dilemma for the Mohlers among us, for it means that God is making people who, in the midst of what may otherwise be morally exemplary lives, have a special and inherent predisposition to sin. Mohler's response is that since Adam's fall, sin is the condition of all humankind. That sidesteps, however, the conundrum that a gay person may follow the same God-given instincts as a straight person -- let's assume fidelity and the desire for church sanctification in both cases -- and end up damned while the straight person ends up saved. Indeed, it means that a gay person's duty is to suppress his God-given instincts while a straight person's duty is to fulfill his.

I don't think there's anything about evangelical Christian doctrine suggesting that all people walk equally difficult paths; God, I assume they would say, obviously lays greater challenges before some than others, for reasons that only He perceives. Just as someone unlucky enough to be born to a Muslim or atheist family faces a more difficult challenge than one born to good Christians, someone born with an inherent predisposition toward some specific form of sin faces a particularly difficult path.

Indeed, the simplicity of this argument makes me wonder why religious conservatives seem so terrified of the notion that their might be a genetic basis for homosexuality. Conservatives have long been tolerant of and even attached to the idea that certain forms of difference are inherent. Inherent difference in race, class, and gender provides an easy and convenient explanation of inequality, and a ready defense against egalitarian arguments. In the case of homosexuality in particular, the "inherent" argument gives fools like Mickey Kaus a simple dodge: I don't like gays because I'm genetically predisposed to not liking gays.

On the other hand, I'll also admit that I really don't understand the other side of the argument. Leftist, progressive politics has a strong record of denying inherent inequality and inherent difference; this is key to the leftist critique of racial, gender, and class hierarchy. On the question of homosexuality, however, a lot of progressives seem willing to accept the "inherency" argument, and even to use it as a foundation for a case about equal treatment for gays and lesbians. Now, I know that this isn't an argument that finds much currency in Queer Theory, but it does seems to have a lot of popular support, at least among the gay men that I know.

I can certainly understand the value of the "inherency" argument as part of a personal narrative ("I didn't choose homosexuality"), and as a rhetorial device making family life easier (explaining to your dad that your gay may be easier if you don't use the language of choice), but it has always struck me as deeply problematic for two reasons. First, I'm genuinely hostile to almost all arguments that rest on a genetic basis for contemporary socio-political behavior. There's a reason that John Tierney loves stories of evolutionary psychology so much; they almost always involve justifications of certain kinds of inequality. More importantly, they're almost always sloppy; recall Mickey Kaus' silly arguments about smart college students marrying smart college students and consequently producing tremendous inequality in the 1980s and 1990s, as if the elite had never intermarried before 1977.

The second and bigger problem has to do with the political narrative. Simply put, resting an argument for the political rights of a small minority on the logic of inherent difference strikes me as remarkably ill-conceived. It depends on this idea that the majority will concede rights to a minority that it may find morally reprehensible because the minority is inherently reprehensible. In other words, it implies that the only option available to the majority in the face of inherent difference is acceptance and the concession of political equality. It should hardly need be noted that this is not the only option available to such a majority, and that the language of inherency carries with it some extraordinarily dangerous implications.

Much better, I think, to try to develop a vocabulary that doesn't depend on the distinction between nature and choice. In other words, some characteristics cannot be useful described as either chosen or inherent. The job then, within a liberal framework, at least, is to make the case that these differences ought to be politically irrelevant, and that the gay/straight distinction shouldn't matter for questions of marriage/benefits/rights claims/etc.

Those are my thoughts, anyway. I concede the field to the political theorists...

Credit Where Due

In order to maintain my centrist cred, I'll agree with Matt and disagree with John Holbo on Rudy Giuliani's ode to authority:

We look upon authority too often and focus over and over again, for 30 or 40 or 50 years, as if there is something wrong with authority. We see only the oppressive side of authority. Maybe it comes out of our history and our background. What we don't see is that freedom is not a concept in which people can do anything they want, be anything they can be. Freedom is about authority. Freedom is about the willingness of every single human being to cede to lawful authority a great deal of discretion about what you do.

This seems, to me, to be almost self-evidently true. Moreover, it's key not only to Hegel but to the entire tradition of social contract theory. Now, as Sully points out there's something mildly scary about a man with Rudy Giuliani's record making this argument, but I nevertheless strongly prefer a coherent defense of the role of authority in political community to the libertarian silliness that often seems to prevail in this kind of discussion.

Climate Change: Views Differ. Ask This Scientician!

Great stuff from Eric Boehlert on the latest NYT hit piece on Al Gore. As he says:

Where the Times went so wrong was that after it discovered there was, in fact, very little serious debate within the mainstream scientific community (i.e. "the middle ground"), the paper still plowed ahead with its controversial thesis and tried to fool its readers by suggesting, very high up in the story, that there were deep rifts among "rank and file" scientists -- "the centrists," as the newspaper called them. If that were true, the Times article, written by William Broad, would have been brimming with rank-and-file scientists questioning Gore's facts. It was not.

Instead, as blogger David Roberts noted, the article had "all the hallmarks of a vintage Gore hit piece: half-truths, outright falsehoods, unsubstantiated quotes, and a heaping dose of innuendo." The article also had all the hallmarks of a journalist approaching a topic with an already confirmed belief and then working backwards trying to prove that point by selectively quoting sources.

The Times piece did prove that the newspaper was willing to cast a very wide net to locate sources with scientific affiliations who expressed doubts about An Inconvenient Truth. No offense, but if an emeritus professor from Western Washington University was the most prominent critic the Times could find (the prof's the first person quoted in the Gore piece), I'm guessing Gore is on pretty solid footing. (Another critic prominently quoted by the Times isn't even an environmental scientist.)

See here, here, here, here, and here for detailed analysis of the article's obvious scientific shortcomings. In short, the article has been thoroughly demolished.

No offense intended to Dave's alma mater, but that's what you call manufacturing a controversy.

You Bought...a Bunch of Them?

Shorter Verbatim Dr. Mrs. Ole Perfesser: "My favorite bumper sticker as of late is one that states, "Bumper Stickers Are Not the Answer." I bought a bunch of them just because I thought it was funny. However, sometimes bumper stickers are the answer, they can tell you oodles about the person in front of you and warn you to avoid the person or just make you laugh. A good laugh is nothing to sneeze at and frankly, neither is an early warning system that tells you that the driver in front of you lacks critical thought, is emotionally fragile, or just has a wicked sense of humor when you see a bumper sticker that says something like this: "Where are we going, and why am I in this handbasket?""

Um, I think this is one of those times when commentary is superfluous, except to say that I guess drawing broad psychological inferences based on bumper stickers might be slightly less unreliable than basing such inferences on someone's socks.

[Via Roy.]

Good Grief

Really -- it's like the Times was determined to out-stupid the block quotes from Scott's post yesterday about Frank Rich. In an utterly substance-free piece, Mark Leibovich and Patrick Healy approach Althousian limits of vapidity (e.g., Al Gore was seen eating a low fat sandwich! It's funny because he's fat! Al Gore is on a first-name basis with Ludacris -- get it? Ludacris has only one name! Cheeky!) But the opening paragraphs are simply astonishing:

The last time Al Gore appeared publicly inside the United States Capitol, he was certifying the Electoral College victory of George W. Bush. He returns on Wednesday, a heartbreak loser turned Oscar boasting Nobel hopeful globe trotting multimillionaire pop culture eminence.

For Mr. Gore, who calls himself a “recovering politician,” returning to Capitol Hill is akin to a recovering alcoholic returning to a neighborhood bar. He will, in all likelihood, deliver his favorite refrain about how “political will is a renewable resource” and how combating global warming is the “greatest challenge in the history of mankind.” He will confront one of his fervent detractors, Senator James M. Inhofe, Republican of Oklahoma, who derides Mr. Gore as an alarmist.

He will also embrace old friends, pose (or not) for cellphone photos and greet the legion of climate change disciples who swear by the “Goracle” as a contemporary sage.

As the heir apparent to many generations of unrenowned alcoholics, perhaps I'm a little unforgiving here. But given that (a) Al Gore is not a recovering alcoholic; and (b) the sitting President is, I'm eager to know how the Times plans to cover George W. Bush's return to DC in, say, 2014:

(1) For former President George W. Bush, returning to the White House is akin to a recovering alcoholic returning to the couch he woke up on three mornings each week when Laura couldn't stand his snoring and pointless midnight soliloquys about how much he hates his father.

(2) For former President George W. Bush, returning to the White House is akin to a recovering cocaine user hitting Studio 54 and doing speedballs with John Belushi and Rick James, circa 1978. He will, in all likelihood, deliver his favorite refrain about how "Freedom is God's gift to humanity," and how "cocaine is a hell of a drug."

(3) The last time George W. Bush appeared publicly inside the White House, he was a hapless shell of a man, pacing the halls with a Nixonian aura of disgrace and humiliation after a second term of near-continuous blundering. He returns on Wednesday, his reputation in tact as one of the worst American presidents since James Buchanan. For Mr. Bush, who calls himself as a "recovering decider," returning to the White House is like a recovering substance abuser returning to the party shack he used to trash when he was in one of those "dark places."

. . . in comments, Lemuel Pitkin reminds us of this bit of flatulence from Healy a year ago . . .

The woods are lovely, dark and deep

For several years now, I've tried to explain to my wife that every 12-year-old boy harbors a secret fantasy of being rescued by a helicopter. As my wife teaches 7th grade and pretty much understands that 12-year-old boys are idiots, she's actually needed little persuasion here.

With that in mind, I'll be filing this under "Additional Evidence in Support of Adolescent Male Helicopter Rescue Theory":

It was not immediately clear exactly how the boy took care of himself or whether he put any of his Scout wilderness training to use. But he had worn two jackets, one of them fleece, and was believed to have a mess kit and potato chips with him when he disappeared. He told the rescue team he had been drinking water from streams.

Searchers spotted Michael walking along a stream before he saw them.

"They called his name. He didn't respond ... Once they said 'We're here to rescue you,' the first thing he said is he wanted a helicopter ride out of there," said Blue Ridge Parkway ranger David Bauer.

I think Richard Nixon said more or less the same thing in August 1974, but I could be wrong.

Technical Difficulties

It seems that I have inadvertantly deleted my nineteen closest competitors in the LGM Tourney Challenge. Your entries still exist, and I've unlocked the league; simply rejoin:

League Name: Lawyers, Guns and Money
Password: zevon

Why I Have Less Than No Use For Frank Rich

As a follow-up to my post about Al Gore allegedly "squandering" the 2000 campaign, I thought it would be useful to take a look at Frank Rich's analysis of the first debate (where Gore's victory among viewers was esclipsed by Bush's wins among the army of morons who covered it.) As Rich's colleague Paul Krugman--who, unfashionably enough for a media pundit, actually cares about policy outcomes--was pointing out, it was also where Gore laid out a serious policy agenda while Bush systematically dissembled about his plan to piss away the surplus on upper-class tax cuts. How did Rich cover it?

Still, I wouldn't have missed the debate for anything. Though it added exactly zero to our knowledge of either Al Gore or George W. Bush, it is a keeper for any time capsule of America 2000. At a cultural moment when many voters are forced constantly to make that hard choice between the Gap and Banana Republic, what is more apt than the spectacle of two princely boomers in identical outfits hypothesizing about how to spend a surplus of infinitely elastic trillions that both assume will last indefinitely?

Ha-ha, Gap and the Banana Republic, very droll! But did you hear the one about "Gush and Bore"? That's a real knee-slapper! Anyway, I take the point; there's really no difference between an accomplished center-left vice president and a not-very-bright guy who governed to the right of the Texas legislatures--after all, they both wear suits!

...what is more apt than the spectacle of two princely boomers in identical outfits hypothesizing about how to spend a surplus of infinitely elastic trillions that both assume will last indefinitely? Now that branding and marketing are the national ideology -- and focus groups have a clout unmatched by labor unions or the religious right -- what could be more fitting than a debate in which not a single word is uttered that hasn't been pre-tested more rigorously than a McDonald's breakfast sandwich rollout?

Jesus Christ, the whole goddamned point of the "lockbox" phrase you reliably make fun of later is that Gore doesn't assume that the surplus will last forever. Almost as if, unlike his opponent, he actually knows what he's talking about.

Though Mr. Bush is fond of boasting that he's a man of principle, not ''polling and focus groups,'' he was just as scripted as his opponent -- no small feat. Mr. Gore's hit parade of tested buzz words and phrases -- ''middle class'' (10 mentions), ''wealthiest 1 percent'' (10), ''lockbox'' (7) -- was nearly matched by Mr. Bush's Pavlovian references to bringing ''Republicans and Democrats'' together (9) and ''fuzzy'' math (4).

Wow, people actually prepare for debates and reiterate key themes in modern presidential campaigns. No kidding! But good that you repeated the narrative about Gore being "scripted." Good boy.

OK, he does say something about Bush's lies:

The moment came when Mr. Bush told a Gore-like whopper, fudging his previous stand in favor of trying to thwart the F.D.A.'s approval of RU-486, the abortion pill.

Bush told him one lie--which made him for a second just like that evil Al Gore, whose entirely fictious lies Rich has been hyping (and sometimes making up himself) for months!

And, the inevitable punchline:

Mr. Bush is still an entitled, hail-fellow-well-met American blueblood who has coasted through life with the right name and its attendant connections. Mr. Gore is still the overcalculating child of the expediencies of Washington, where no principle is written in stone for longer than a polling cycle.

Because you can recite cliched personality narratives about both candidates, see, what difference does it make who becomes president?

What a disgrace that people like this are hired to analyze politics in this country's most presigious newspapers. (I think you can see why the Times thought it was a great idea to hire Ann Althouse for 5 columns.) Nothing rings hollower than the anti-war posturing of people like Rich and Dowd--few people worked harder to make it happen. Not out of principle, but because they're vapid, self-satified clowns.

Eroticizing PTSD?

I agree with Lindsay--the choice of photos for the article about women in the military suffering from PTSD is exceedingly strange, although this charitable interpretation of the editors' motives is plausible enough. Kay has more on the article's substantive content.

The Bill of Rights Is The First Casualty Of The War On Drugs

What do you mean we can't punish oral sex just because it happens off-campus? Let's install cameras! It will destroy our precious bodily fluids educational mission!


The War On (Some Classes of People Who Use Some) Drugs has, among its many other problems, acted as an all-purpose Fourth Amendment destruction machine. The nation's former Panty-Sniffer-in Chief proposes that we throw the First Amendment into the refuse heap while we're at it:

Oral argument in Morse v. Frederick does reveal some of the worst aspects of sharing a bong. The first being paranoia. Because according to Kenneth Starr, former righteous independent counsel—now tanned Californian law-school dean—the fate of the drug wars depends upon the unconditional school message that drugs are bad, yet schools cannot enforce that message because smartass kids keep undermining them. Starr's alternative (and if you ask me, far more paranoia-inducing) universe: Schools get limitless discretion to craft broad "educational missions" and are then free to squelch any student speech that "undermines" them.

The justices appear to loathe each alternative about equally. At some point, Justice Stephen Breyer groans that a ruling for the students would encourage them to be "testing limits all over the place in the high schools," whereas a ruling for the schools would certainly end up limiting lots of speech.

Starr opens with the statement that "the glorification of the drug culture" is at stake here. He claims that schools, even under the broad standard laid out in the armband case, can't necessarily limit political protest but may bar "disruptive speech." This sets the court's hippies off. Justice Anthony Kennedy: "There's no classroom here." Justice David Souter: "What did it disrupt on the sidewalk?"

Yes, it's certainly not as if these restrictions are content-based restrictions of speech!

That middle paragraph is a little scary; I fear that we might be in for a Breyer swing opinion in which he upholds the policy but writes a "compromise" opinion emphasizing that a future violation of the First Amendment might be enough to shock his conscience or something.

Oh Yeah...

It's LGM's bracket. The rest of you are just visiting...

1 Lexington Bearded Ducks , R. Farley 530 99.2

Alito Sucks , S. Lemieux 530 99.2

3 Stock 1 , A. Stock 510 96.7

4 Mackin 1 , J. Mackin 500 94.0

Smith 2 , P. Smith 500 94.0

Your Logo Here , j. noon 500 94.0

Milwaukee Dogs , M. Ricci 500 94.0

8 Guitar Zero , D. Rowland 490 90.2

9 Hanna 1 , C. Hanna 480 83.7

Headless 3-pt Gunners , Z. N 480 83.7

Hal Jordan Is My Co-Pilot , j. burkland 480 83.7

12 Unhistorical , K. Adams 470 77.3

boiler busters , W. Bell 470 77.3

Plethora of Shockers , I. Fish 470 77.3

James 1 , J. James 470 77.3

Jackdaw U #1 , J. Daw 470 77.3

K...S...U...Wildcats , M. Ray 470 77.3

18 Incertus , B. Spears 460 69.8

Axis of Evel Knievel , D. Noon 460 69.8

Nelson 1 , B. Nelson 460 69.8

Leo's Straussians , M. Strausz 460 69.8

CT: More Dangerous

The world's most dangerous perfesser has joined CT, a most welcome development. Whether our annual NHL playoff preview will migrate to that august site as a chaser to all that damned soccer blogging remains unconfirmed at press time.

In Anticipation of Treason-in-Defense-of-Slavery Month

From Stephen, via Sully:


















Stephen:

Of course, certain people have issues with this display:

"Robert Hurst, the leader of the local Sons of Confederate Veterans group, calls the display 'tasteless and offensive,' and demanded the museum remove it. 'That display is extremely offensive. It's very tasteless," Hurst said. "What they've told us, as Southerners, as sons of the Confederacy, is that it's okay to offend us.'"

Yeah, pretty much. Just like it's ok to offend neo-Nazis or the KKK or any other group that is organized around either the hatred of other skin colors and/or the celebration of a massive act of treason and organized murder of fellow citizens that is still the bloodiest conflict in American history. The reason for seceeding from the United States was slavery; the documents of the Confederate states make this completely clear. The only concern of theirs for "states rights" was that they retained the right to own slaves.

Well put. See also Loomis...

You can do just about anything with Sea Ponies except sit on them

Meantime, I think it's time the Bush administration considered a new strategy. Patience is a virtue, certainly, but if we've got the Sea Ponies at our disposal, I see no reason not to go ahead and use them. I predict that the next six months in Iraq -- with the Sea Ponies standing up so America can stand down -- will be a critical period in the history of this war.

Why I'm not buying your crap on eBay

This could have paid off a good chunk of my student loan, but the stuffed shirts at eBay shut down the auction and permanently suspended my account. It's been three years, and I'm still bitter.

. . . Broke the server. Working on it . . .

Department of Inane Hyperbole

Ordinary crime has apparently become too boring for this fellow, who muses -- while writing about a recent shooting in Georgia -- that we have entered something ominously described as the "era of individual jihad." He founds his theory on the work of a source whose credentials appear to include only her ability to speak Arabic and her talent for receiving invitations to conservative speaking events. Regardless, the Jawa logic is spellbinding:

Al Qaeda sympathizers have recently declared it so. Further, these al Qaeda fellow-travellers have produced a series of 'how-to' videos for the individual jihadist. A kind of step-by-step do-it-yourself guide for would-be jihadists who do not, or cannot, belong to an organized terror cell. The terrorist of the future--and of now--may not belong to a terror group at all, but rather, will carry out acts of terrorism with little or no outside direction or support.

Was this alleged attack on a returned soldier in Georgia an act of individual jihad? It's unclear. It's very possible that this is nothing more than a case of overblown egos clashing. But it's also not wise, in this 'age of individual jihad', to simply write the incident off simply because the two Muslims do not have any known connection to extremist groups.

Of course! Because someone who apparently self-publishes her own books thinks we've entered teh EIJ, it would be unwise of us not to assume that every altercation between a Muslim and a non-Muslim just might be a little piece of homestyle jihad. Examined in this light, of course, the definition of terrorism in the USA Patriot Act seems dangerously quaint. Remember -- the constitution is not a suicide pact, and extremism in defense of liberty is no vice.

The Countermobilization Tautology

Speaking of nominal supporters of gay rights and specious backlash arguments, you may remember that in the wake of the New Jersey civil unions ruling Glenn Reynolds said that "changes like this are better made through legislative than judicial means, and that this may well benefit the Republicans substantially in the coming elections." So, what does he think about his preferred position on gun rights in D.C. being required by the courts rather than by democratically elected officials? He predicts a massive backlash if the Supreme Court defers to elected officials and upholds the law. Or what about Tom Maguire, who argued that "gay marriage or civil unions is fine if enacted by the state legislature but wrong if crammed down by judicial fiat." Oddly, I haven't seen any posts on his part hand-wringing about gun rights "being crammed down the throats of the people by judicial fiat," but he has approvingly linked to a defense of the decision.

Of course, it is possible to agree with one decision and not the other for doctrinal reasons. But neither Reynolds nor Maguire disputed the legal reasoning of the New Jersey decision (and I'm going out on a limb and assuming that neither gentleman is an expert on New Jersey constitutional law). Rather, they simply made the a priori assumption that the gay marriage issue should be left to elected officials, regardless of a state's constitutional order, and also assumed that it's politically counterproductive for gay rights advocates to use litigation. But for some reason, when there's an issue they actually care about these concerns about backlash and junior-high-school democratic theories mysteriously vanish. Why, it's almost enough to make me think that claims that litigation produces a unique backlash are disingenuous and incoherent, and that their objections to the New Jersey decision were about substance, not procedure.

The Goodridge Backlash?

In response to my point that Mickey Kaus's nominal support for gay marriage was empty because he never finds any means of achieving it acceptable (the only meaningful difference between people who are flat-out reactionaries and people who support social change unless it might cause social conflict or affect entrenched interests is that the former are at least honest), a commenter asks: "There wasn't a massive backlash after the San Francisco and Massachusetts decisions? This didn't mobilize the Republican vote in Ohio and other battleground states, thus costing Democrats the 2004 election?" Although the question is apparently meant to be rhetorical, the short answer is in fact "no."

I'm presenting the long answer in an updated version of a paper I'm presenting at the MWPSA conference next month, and Dan Pinello does a good job of summarizing the arguments in his new book too. To summarize the many problems with the countermobilization thesis:

• The state backlash was window dressing. The strongest argument for the Kaus backlash thesis are the 13 state initiatives passed in 2004 which passed following Goodridge and Gavin Newsom's actions. However, the actual cost of these initiatives for the cause of gay rights was trivial. In none of these states did gays and lesbians lose legal privileges*; and as Pinello notes, in 9 of the 13 states the new amendments just mirrored statutory bans on gay marriage that already existed. And since state constitutional amendments are generally no harder to change than a statute, the political cost is nominal. A federal constitutional amendment -- which is almost impossible to change -- would be a different issue, but of course the FMA was pure cynical exploit-the-bigotry-of-the-rubes politics with no chance of actually passing. Gay marriage isn't any less popular now than it was in 2004. In other words, there's no evidence that Goodridge actually made the practical task of achieving gay marriage harder. So, clearly, the decision was a net benefit: they gained in Massachusetts (where pro-gay rights legislators have fared better than opponents of the court's decision, belying claims of a backlash), without actually losing ground anywhere else. As a general matter, I also don't believe there's any significant empirical basis for claims that judicial opinions create uniquely large backlashes.
  
• The election myth. As Pinello notes, the evidence that gay rights was a decisive factor in the 2004 election is scant-to-nonexistent; once you go beyond eyeballing exit polls and actually do empirical studies of voting behavior, the alleged effects disappears. Moreover, at this point the various strands in the antiliberal obsessions of Kaus and his fellow travelers start to collapse on one another. Kerry in 2004 did historically well given that he was facing a wartime incumbent in a decent economy. Obviously, few people (and Kaus least of all) would claim that this was because Kerry was an incredibly strong candidate. But if a massive anti-gay backlash hurt the Democrats badly, where did the votes go? And none of this is surprising. People who are single-issue gay marriage obsessives are pretty unlikely to be liberal otherwise.
  
• Predicting 9 of the last 2 backlashes. You may recall Kaus, and may other pundits predicting that the decision of courts in New Jersey to require civil unions would cause a major backlash against the Democrats in the 2006 election. You may also recall that this didn't happen even at the level of simple correlation, which will be promptly forgotten the next time the courts issue a similar holding.
  

Obviously, substantive victories (achieved in any branch of government) will produce opposition from people who oppose them, which would obviously be a stupid reason not to want to win. But there's no evidence that judicial opinions produce a unique backlash, and there's also no evidence that gay marriage won the 2004 elections for the Republicans.

*UPDATE: As Mithras and another commenter note, this isn't entirely accurate; while there was no loss of state marriage benefits in these states, in Michigan and Virginia it did interfere with the ability of gays and lesbians to negotiate private benefits.

Hey, That's a New Twist!

For some reason, it seems like the number of "I'm a Nigerian ministerial official, and have $36 million I'd like to share with you if only you can help me get it out of the country" e-mails have gone through the roof. I can't understand why; did people suddenly get a lot stupider, or have they just been picking my e-mail address out more often? Anyway, I got a slightly classier version this morning:

1st Armored Division
Iraq

Good day,

We are American soldiers fighting in Iraq serving in the military of the 1st Armored Division. The saga of rise and death tolls should not be new to you and i am sure you will not find this mail worrisome. We have seen so much in our days of stay here and no matter how much we paint the picture, you will never understand.

During our invasion of some hiding out mansion used by al-Qaida leader in Iraqi Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi we discovered huge amount of money in cash and mostly in 100 dollar bills, Most of the funds were taken by our superiors and we can not authoritatively or emphatically make over statements concerning the money

But it will interest you to know that we are able to secure part of the money for ourself, please we need your assistance to secure and Invest the money in our behalf,I am interested in investing in Real Estate or any other profitable venture you may suggest,

You may be surprise or skeptical why I chose you as a partner in this deal since I do not know you, well I decided not to contact any body I know for this business to avoid any implications or blackmailing now or in the future considering my self as an American Soldier, I hope you will understanding and co-operation accordingly

The funds are available and will be released to you as soon as I receive a positive response from you. attached is the pictures of where and how the fund was discovered, more will be explain to you once I get your consent to this effect

Feel free to come up with your percentage sharing pattern of the fund as I am as good as yielding towards accepting a reasonable percentage share of the fund you will demand for the benefit of our mutual understanding.

Wow; it would almost be unpatriotic of me if I didn't help these guys out! And I get to share in some terrorist money, too!

Private Morality and Public Policy

Matt quotes my colleague Ken Sherrill about why Democrats who support equal rights may be reluctant to disclaim the notion that homosexuality is immoral. The other important point, I think, is that from a political (as opposed to personal) level, what matters is the policy, not the subjective morality. Just as it doesn't matter what John McCain "really" thinks about abortion when he's resolutely in favor of criminalizing it, if you support gay rights your personal position about the morality of gay sexuality is not terribly important.

...Pithlord, Matt and lt are correct to point out in comments that it's wrong to imply that public comments about the morality of sexuality are irrelevant. Obviously, it's suboptimal for candidates to express the wrong opinion on the issue.

WASPS!

Victor Davis Hanson may or may not actually f**k like a beast -- I really don't want to think about it -- but he certainly writes as if he were swinging slabs of raw pork against his keyboard.

In the latest free "outtake" [sic] from his upcoming novel, Cultosaurus Erectus No Man a Slave, Hanson spins a humble parable about the wisdom of declaring pre-emptive war against gall wasps, fairy flies, flower wasps, mud divers, yellow jackets and all other insects of the order Hymenoptera and suborder Apocrita that are not bees or ants:

“But tell me this also farmer,” Epaminondas pressed even closer, still grinning at upping the Thespian. “Think when you have wasps with the sharp tails in you vineyard that Malgis planted. You know the terrible black ones. The ones that sting the paws of sleeping Sturax over there. Or land on the nose of Porpax. Or even in their pride jab the tall legs of your Neto or the chest of buxom Damo—do you chase them all over the orchard, flailing at one or two of them with the broom or clapping at them with your hands?”

“Of course, not!” Odd that the Theban knew of Neto and his son’s wife Damo, and of Chion and apparently Sturax and Porpax too, but at least not Gorgos as well.

“You think me a fool, Theban? To protect this household that you apparently know so well, I hunt out the nest of these stingers and then burn them out all at once with a torch of straw. Yes, I do. And so would you, had you any sense.” Melon sensed the Theban had a good lid on his own pot, and would need two or three more sticks on the fire before boiling over.

Still, Epaminondas flashed his black eyes, “Then don’t mark me a fool either, when you call me dream monger and worse. Like an old woman by the fire, you warn me that it is terrible to fight the Spartans. Maybe it is—as we both know—or maybe not. But when you fight the Spartans, you must kill their king. No one, not even our Malgis had done that. Then when you take on Sparta, you fight in Sparta, not where and when the kings slither or buzz to sting you.”

Now, this may be the way Epaminomodilsaiuhurlhhdsdjkas likes to fight a nest of wasps, but there's probably a better way, me thinks. When my dogs -- who for all their faults at least don't have wuss names like "Sturax" and "Porpax" -- are stung by wasps from the yonder fields of Thespai, Thisbe, and Tangara, I'm generally too fucking lazy to go deal with the problem sensibly. After all, the rich bastards who live on my farm want their rents lowered, and they want to ride around in their big fucking wagons with those expensive Arabian horses and their togas spun from gold and all that. And what am I going to say? "No?" As if! So I figure, fuck it -- I'm going to just borrow a lot of money and pay some dickheads who live near the wasps' nest to take care of the problem for me.

My neighbors usually offer to help out, but I figure fuck them, too -- what do they know? They seem to object when my hired dickheads catch a wasp here and there and bring it back to me so I can pull its wings off and get out the magnifying glass and make it listen to bad music from my pan flute. So the neighbors are out, the pussies.

Anyhoo, while other folks are off dealing with the wasps' nest, I'm going to borrow some more money, fluff the rich some more, and start looking around for some ant hills to crush. They may not be wasps, but they're Apocrita all the same, and I'm pretty sure I can take them.



. . . in comments, Texas' newest ex-pat points us to a cartoon that just about says it all . . .

Sunday Deposed Monarch Blogging: House of Iturbide

In the wake of the Mexican War of Independence, General Agustin de Iturbide came to power as head of Mexico's new ruling junta. Originally an officer in the Spanish Army, General Iturbide had switched to the rebel side in 1820, a defection that proved important to the cause of Mexican independence. Iturbide defected, in part, because of his commitment to conservative criollo values; a coup d'etat in Spain had brought a liberal government to power, and Iturbide wished to protect Mexico from the threat of real revolution. Consequently, while Iturbide's defection helped ensure Mexican independence, it also served to deradicalize the pro-independence forces.

Nevertheless, Iturbide remained a committed royalist. Part of the deal that brought together the various pro-independence forces was a scheme to find a European monarch to replace Ferdinand VII on the throne of Mexico. However, no immediate replacement could be found, as few European monarchs had much of an interest in insulting Ferdinand. At the behest of his officers and men, Agustin de Iturbide decided to accept the throne, and was declared Emperor of Mexico in May 1822. The young emperor (thirty-nine years old when he assumed the throne) had been born in Mexico to Spanish parents. Unfortunately, he did not make a successful transition from military to civilian leadership. His management style grated on the rest of the ruling clique, and in early 1823 a movement developed to force his abdication. He gave up the throne in March 1823 and fled to Italy. For unclear reasons, he returned to Mexico in 1824, at which point he was immediately arrested and shot shortly thereafter.

In the absence of the strong, guiding hand of an Emperor, the Republic of Mexico proceeded to lose a third of its land territory and accumulate massive debts over the next forty years. In 1860, Britain, France, and Spain attacked Mexico in order to force the payment of debts. Although Britain and Spain soon withdrew, Napoleon III had other plans. French forces marched to Mexico City, and in 1864 placed Maximilian I on the throne. Mexican monarchists had previously entertained the idea of offering the crown to Maximilian, but he turned down an offer in 1859 because he suspected popular support for the monarchy was insufficient. Maximilian's father was a Habsburg and his mother a Wittelsbach, giving him a suitably impressive bloodline for his stint as Emperor of Mexico. Sadly, Maximilian had been misled about the extent of royalist sentiment in Mexico. Although he adopted the grandsons of Agustin de Iturbide as his heirs, he was unable to win the support of Mexican liberals, and irritated conservatives through his efforts to win republican support. In 1866 France withdrew its troops at the behest of the United States, and Republican forces began to prevail. Captured in May 1867 after the fall of Queretaro, Maximilian was court martialed and, to the horror of the crowned heads of Europe, executed by firing squad.

Agustin and Salvador de Iturbide, the appointed heirs of Maximilian, continued to press their claims to the Mexican throne, although without success. Agustin died in exile in the United States, and Salvador died of appendicitis in Venice. Salvador's daughter Maria Joseph then became head of the Imperial House, dying in 1949 after being interned by the Rumanian Communist government after World War II. The current claimant to the throne of Mexico is Maximilian von Götzen-Iturbide, who presumably will become Maximilian II if his claim is recognized. Born in 1944, Maximiliano has demonstrated little interest in pressing his claim, perhaps because of the rather grim fates of his two predecessors. Prospects for a return to the throne appear extremely grim, as no monarchist movement worth mentioning exists in Mexico, and because of the lack of interest on the part of the Maximiliano, who currently lives in Australia.

Trivia: The current claimant to which throne has served successively as Minister of Health, Minister of Education, and Ambassador to the United States?

Hacktacular!

Glenn Reynolds asserts as fact that "it was Joe Wilson who outed Valerie Plame." If you clink through the link, however, you'll note that the linkee provides no evidence whatsoever for his assertion; he's got nothing but a just-so story based on pure speculation. Of course, we are dealing with a guy who proclaimed the Plame scandal "bogus" because she appeared in a public photo after she had already been outed, so admittedly the illogic and lack of evidence here are modest by his historical standards.

Ooh, a Murder Mystery! In Space!! (Spoilers)

Note to Ron Moore: For whatever reason, the writing and production team you have assembled cannot put together a murder mystery. All of the episodes centering on a murder mystery (Black Market, The Woman King, Litmus) are really bad, and the murder mystery elements of several other episodes (The Son Also Rises, Final Cut) are also quite bad. As there are, in fact, other potentially profitable storylines (something involving Cylons, for example) please stop with the awful CSI: Battlestar Galactica eps.

Not Paying Attention

Hey, statements like "I probably deserved this" make me feel bad about vicious. personal critiques of Mickey Kaus. On the other hand, statements like

U.S. military deaths in Iraq have apparently declined by about 20% since the "surge" began.

display what can only be described as an extraordinary level of ignorance about the US occupation of Iraq. Since the beginning of the Occupation, casualities have unsurprisingly fluctuated from month to month. I'm not sure when Mickey dates the beginning of the "Surge", but US killed for January were 2.77/day, for February were 3.0/day, and for March thus far have been 2.94/day. November and September 2006 deaths were 2.57 day, and August 2006 2.13/day. Since December 15, 2005 US deaths have run 2.45/day.

Obviously, it's absurd to claim that US deaths have dropped 20% since the beginning of the "surge". But this is hardly surprising; Kaus' assaults on the Left have never required evidence, while his attacks on the Right... well, if he made one, I might have something to say about it...

Aw....

Deepest condolences to Mike "Leo" Strausz on the defeat of his Michigan State Spartans. Sadly, Mike made the cardinal error of confusing his rooting interests with a rational assessment of the odds. I would never make such a mistake...

Worst American Birthdays, vol. VIII

John Wayne Gacy -- restaurant manager, building contractor, Jaycee, birthday entertainer, Democratic party precinct captain, and serial killer -- was born 65 years ago today in Chicago.

Although his father was an alcoholic and Gacy himself suffered a head injury and heart problems as a youth, his childhood was more or less uneventful. As a young man he meandered his way into the world of business, becoming a successful shoe salesman in Illinois and the manager of a Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant in Iowa. After enduring a divorce and serving a brief prison term for child molestation -- a crime that stemmed from his days managing the KFC -- Gacy returned to the city of his birth in 1971. He remarried, becoming a stepfather to two children, and during his free time -- when he wasn't impressing the community with his volunteer work as an amateur clown -- began raping and strangling young men and boys. Dismayed by her husband's erratic behavior and his peculiar reading habits, Gacy's second wife left him in 1976; he was less than devastated by the divorce and continued about both his work and his hobbies. At the time of his confession in December 1978, John Wayne Gacy had murdered 33 people, most of whom he buried underneath his house and garage, which he famously described as an unlicensed funeral home.

Four days before his 38th birthday, Gacy was condemned to death by the state of Illinois. He spent the next 14 years at Manard Correctional Facility outside Chester, Illinois, where he passed much of his time painting clowns. In May 1994, Gacy was injected with a lethal dose of sodium thiopentol, pancurinium bromide and potassium chloride after reinforcing his arteries with a final meal of fried chicken and french fries. His last words, according to legend, were "kiss my ass."

A cultural icon, John Wayne Gacy has been the subject of dozens of books, numerous documentary films, and countless songs. Of the latter, this is the only one worth a damn, even though it understates Gacy's actual body count:



. . . better video (longer loading time, though) here:

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Ownership Foreclosure Society

File this under "Depressing but Not Surprising":

From 2000 to 2005, homeownership rates increased significantly only among households in the top two-fifths of the income distribution, those earning more than $46,883, according to the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey.

Homeownership declined for families in the bottom two-fifths of the income scale. In the lowest fifth — where families make less than $20,180 — homeownership was only 42.4 percent in 2005, which was 3 percentage points less than it was 25 years earlier and 26 percentage points below the national average.

Part of the reason is the structure of government subsidies, which are worth very little to low-income families but quite a bit to families with big incomes. Those well-off families typically do not need government support to buy a home but use it to buy bigger places than they would otherwise purchase.

June, according to the article, has been declared "National Homeownership Month" by President Bush. By that time, it appears that well over half a million homes purchased with sub-prime mortgages will be in arrears or foreclosure. Thank goodness we've maintained our bankruptcy laws so that people facing difficult economic circumstances can start ov-- oh, wait. Never mind.

Friday Cat (Power) Blogging

Missed Opportunities

Goddammit.

Oh, well. Looks like Assrocket was there.

That's right. He actually wrote that "[a]nyone willing to criticize Gandhi, the most overrated man of the 20th century, is worth a second look."

The Coming Misogyny of Campaign '08

What Garance said. Beck's attack on Clinton is no less objectionable than Coulter's attack on Edwards.

...see also Echidne.

Academy of the Overrated: T.V. Edition

Shakes asks about the most overrated shows ever to appear on the teevee. (Fortunately, I've never seen Lost and can avoid her wrath.) Doing this with television can be tricky, especially since so many series go on after being exhausted (because critics seemed to catch up with Six Feet Under only after it became not very good, for example, it could plausibly be on a most underrated and most overrated list.) So I'm thinking of shows in their "prime." And I also strive to bracket out questions of mere genre taste; I find The X-Files overrated not so much on aesthetic grounds as that I find the entire premise too intensely irritating to get beyond, which I don't think is really with the spirit of the category. Anyway, here we go:

• Sex and the City: It was a critical darling and cultural icon. And it was also a show with C-grade broadcast sitcom writing and (Cynthia Nixon excepted) barely-adequate-to-horrible acting about exceptionally uninteresting characters learning fundamentally sexist lessons. In other words, the easiest choice on the list.

• 24: The recent discussion about its right-wing politics obscures the real problems with the show, which is that it sucks, something that was quite evident before its politics became clear. In the immortal words of the Editors, "Here's the plot of "24": there's a bunch of terrorists, Kiefer stops them, oh wait no he didn't, but now he did really, and just in the nick of time! Because even the cruelest TV executive couldn't stretch this over more than 4 hours, the rest of the show has to be padded out with subplots, mainly involving his daughter getting kidnapped. Oh, Lord, can that girl get kidnapped. Most people can live a good long life without ever getting kidnapped; an unfortunate few do get kidnapped once; there are probably a few examples through history of people getting kidnapped two, or maybe even three, times. Kiefer's daughter gets kidnapped like seven times a day. She gets kidnapped from people who kidnapped her from kidnappers. If she makes it to dinner time without being kidnapped at least twice, that's a cause for celebration in the Kiefer household." And the fact that Keifer Sutherland can win a best actor Emmy tells you all you need to know about the value of those awards.

• The West Wing: It may seem strange to put what is, I guess, Sorkin's best show on the list, but that's the overrated/bad distinction. Even if most critics only saw the glaring suckiosity of Studio 60 after it became a ratings fiasco, it's hard to call it overrated at this late date, and SportsNight wasn't long-running enough. Between its wholly unearned reputation for political acuity and the fact that it was a mediocre show discussed as if it was comparable in quality to The Sopranos (hint: in an actual great show, all the characters don't sound like the script's author), I found it essentially unbearable despite the good actors. I'll admit that the 9/11 episode was anomalously bad, but when I saw those students trapped in a room so that a "character" could read--complete with blackboard!--trite moderate-liberal position papers about the Political Implications Of Terrorist Attacks at them, I could identify strongly with them because I had seen an Aaron Sorkin show.

• Law and Order: SVU Granted, the all-pervos-all-the-time premise does largely pre-empt the "I'm putting the Iraq War on trial!!!!!!!!!!!!!" moments that make many late episodes of the mother show unwatchable. Still, there's something about the DeMillian simultaneous exploitation and moralism that's very annoying, and as a procedural it's pretty lame. Plus, Mariska Hargitay isn't that good.

Hey if you need a new stand for your tv then look no further we have the TV furniture you need. Whether its Food Network TV shows you want to watch on you're new big Plasma TV or if you want to hide your old tv in a new tv entertainment center we can help.

How Can Students Understand Whether Xenophobia is Good Or Bad Without Reading Rising Sun?

Shorter Dr. Mrs. Ole Perfesser: "The fact that listening to a fourth-rate pop novelist can cause people to change their minds about the consensus of actual scientists proves that science needs to be balanced with fiction more frequently."

Blog War!!!!!

Bloggingheads freaks out my computer, and watching Mickey Kaus freaks out my eyeballs, so I typically tend to avoid it. Apparently, however, Mickey uses his pedestal to assail Ezra, who seemed, when I met him on Wednesday, to be the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being etc. etc. The point of attack is Ezra's assertion that neoliberalism is both dead and wasn't really all that much anyway.

Mickey's point is fairly simple; the primary enemy of the Democratic Party remains on the left, and Ezra is a twerp for not being able to understand that. The attack on Ezra is only a minor manifestation of Mickey's larger approach to politics. This approach includes, of course, an effort to purge the Democratic Party of all evident Democrats. Ezra's suggestion that neoliberalism is both dead and that it failed is a challenge to just about everything Mickey stands for, both personally and politically. Now, my own position on this question is closer to that of Matt; neoliberalism had its place, but at this point in time the "Left", such that it is, has internalized the most important critiques and has rendered anti-leftists purges of the sort that Mickey is demanding rather pointless and quaint. For Ezra, a young, popular writer with hair to suggest that not only Mickey's political stance but, essentially, his entire career has been a waste of time must be particularly irritating. Mickey, along with so many young men of his generation, fought and died face down in the mud, in the jungles of the New Republic, trying to kill unions and other pro-Democratic interest groups in the 1990s. And now, does anyone appreciate the sacrifice? Does Mickey get a parade? Of course not; rather, some young kid like Ezra Klein comes along and spits in his face, and tells him it was all for nothing.

The biggest problem, of course, is that Mickey remains essentially clueless about most anything that took place after 1998. Even after seven years of George W. Bush, he thinks it more important to assail relatively trivial groups on the left wing of the Democratic Party than to challenge anything (foreign policy, economic, social, etc.) that the Republican Party has done. He is so ignorant of the left half of the blogosphere that he declares Ezra to be on the "far left", an argument that's utterly untenable if you've ever, you know, actually read Ezra Klein. Really, what has to be wrong with someone to assert that "neoliberalism is needed more than ever" in the wake of the Bush administration?

Kaus is a cartoon figure, which Robert Wright tries to point out in polite terms in their Bloggingheads ("you're kind of a neoliberal...icon"). He combines puerile insight with absolutely the worst writing of any blogger I've ever encountered. Without the Slate link, he'd be getting about 40 hits a day. I still find it valuable to launch the occasional attack against him, largely because he's not self-aware enough to render his arguments in less than transparent terms. I'm sure that other "neoliberals" find gays icky, hate unions, and get stiffys from Ann Coulter, but only Mickey fails to understand that these are things that reasonable people ought to be ashamed of.

Treason-in-Defense-of-Slavery Heritage Month

When Loomis attacks!

Responding to Georgia's move to declare April "Confederate Heritage Month," Erik throws the crackers into the horse trough:

The bill's sponsor State Senator Jeff Mullis wants to honor "all those millions of its citizens of various races and ethnic groups and religions who contributed in sundry and myriad ways to the cause of Southern Independence." Meaning those millions, of whom approximately 3 were not white, who tore the country in two in order that they could enslave black people. These treasonous Confederates are clearly worth honoring. After all, not only did they leave the union in order to rape and kill blacks with impunity, tear their families apart, and take their labor for nothing, but they also caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans! Go Confederacy!

It strains credulity, of course, to hear Southern apologists insisting that they're merely trying to "honor" the contributions of a multiracial, multiethnic, ecumencial Confederacy. As David Blight's Race and Reunion argues with great eloquence, the Civil War was as much a struggle over memory as anything else. After the war ended, there were essentially three modes of historical available to account for the origins and brutality of the war -- the white supremacist romance of the Lost Cause; the freedperson's narrative that clearly identified that origins of the war in the inhuman system of chattel slavery and saw the war as an opportunity to vindicate and reconstruct the nation's mission (and its Constitution); and the reconciliationist narrative that urged quick "reunion" between warring brothers.

Blight demonstrates that by the 1890s (and unquestionably by World War I) the reconciliationist memory of the war acquired hegemonic status -- and it did so by throwing the cause of black equality under the wagon and, indeed, accomodating key aspects of the white supremacist narrative, including its willful denial of slavery's centrality to Southern nationalism. In films like Birth of a Nation, for example, we can see elements of both accounts working quite successfully together to make an argument against black freedom. African American historical perspectives are obviously inadmissible, because they would undermine the totality of that racist fable.

My point here is quite simple -- in any public recollection of the American Civil War, there is simply no way to "honor" the Confederacy without reinforcing a sense of satisfaction with the cultural and political victories it miraculously achieved in the half-century that followed the war. The memories that Georgia's legislature seeks to honor were instrumental in the longer project of racist subordination that guided that state well into the 20th century. Not to acknowledge that is, as Loomis points out, to basically admit to being an asshole.

(On a more personal note, I'm already irritated beyond measure that Georgia celebrates Confederate Memorial Day on my daughter's birthday. Now they have to go and potentially spoil the entire month.)

But...That's Where Howard Dean Lives!!!!!!

Congratulations to regular LGM commenter Matt Weiner, who will be leaving beautiful Lubbock, Texas for a new position at the University of Vermont; I have to say that sounds like an excellent move, plus he will be more likely to attend unfogged meetups. Bobby Knight is probably happy to get another damned northern liberal off campus...

[via NYE]

Profound Legal Commitments That Happen To Mirror the GOP Platform

I'm working on a piece about Jan Crawford Greenburg's new book, so I was interested in this take by John O. McGinnis. I agree that it's a good book, although obviously to me her credulous acceptance of self-serving arguments made by conservatives is more a bug than a feature. I agree with McGinnis that the idea that Clarence Thomas is simply Antonin Scalia's sockpuppet--see also Mark Tushnet's excellent book about the Rehnquist Court--should be put to bed permanently. Really, this would be obvious enough from just reading their opinions, but Greenburg has some interesting material about how on his first term Thomas actually convinced Scalia to adopt a stronger position (but, as McGinnis says, in doing so alienated O'Connor.)

McGinnis does, however, makes a familiar conservative move by claiming that conservative justices aren't result-oriented while brining up examples that fatally undermine the proposition. McGinnis asserts that "Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas...think that constitutional rulings should proceed only from analysis of the text" and refers to "Justice Thomas's steadfast adherence to the original understanding of the Constitution." Ironically, however, he cites affirmative action as an example of O'Connor being unprincipled, when of course it is one of the best examples of Scalia and Thomas not being "steadfast" about applying originalist jurisprudence. Affirmative action by state governments can violate the 14th Amendment only by defining its original meaning at such a high level of abstraction that virtually any outcome can be called "originalist." And the idea that the 5th Amendment was understood at the time of its enactment in 1791 as forbidding all racial classification is simply farcical, and yet both Scalia and Thomas (without even attempting an originalist justification) have held that affirmative action is impermissible even at the federal level. Also telling is the fact that McGinnis seems to use textualism and originalism interchangeably. In fact, they can suggest quite different results (the Scalia/Thomas position on affirmative action is a plausible--though not inevitable-- reading of the text, but can't be squared with an originalism of any meaningful content), leaving Scalia and Thomas a wide range of possible outcomes that can accommodate conservative policy outcomes in most cases.

While I agree that it's not accurate to claim that judges are simply "politicians in robes," the claim that disputes on the Supreme Court are purely "legal" is just as much of a half-truth. Affirmative action is an excellent case in point, although oddly conservative scholars sometime cite it as the opposite.

The firewall -- it is good

Look -- it's not like Times Select is the equivalent of a Lexis-Nexis account, so I don't exactly see the story here.

The New York Times decided earlier this week to give free TimesSelect access to college students and faculty with ".edu" in their e-mail addresses, hoping to nurture a stream of young readers that might stick with the paper and TimesSelect after they graduate. But it didn't take long for cynics and TimesSelect critics to suggest that alumni will use the ".edu" test to cheat TimesSelect blind.

If a small handful of college students really want to join alumni associations and maintain their .edu accounts after graduation -- just so they can read Tom Friedman, Maureen Dowd, and the occasional freelance trainwreck -- I imagine they'll come to their senses eventually. Then again, I suppose those alumni magazines can be awfully interesting from time to time.

Waiting For Goldberg

Just in time for him to approvingly quote an email from a reader asserting that "[t]he left doesn't attempt to persuade, they vilify," I see that the publication date for Jonah Goldberg's sober-minded, closely-argued new book Liberals Are Worse Than Hitler, Plus They Call People Names! has been delayed once again:

It's taking longer than expected for Jonah Goldberg's ghostwriter to finish his long awaited worstseller, I Heart Hitler: Without You, Adolf, I'm Nothing. Back in 2003, the Pantload's publisher was promising a 2005 release date. As 2005 passed, Goldberg promised a March 2007 release date, and then a September 11, 2007 (!) release date.

The dupes at Doubleday are now announcing a December 26, 2007 release date which, no doubt, will roll over to a 2008 date by the end of Spring.

Or maybe not. I searched the Doubleday website and could find nothing on Lucianne Jnr.'s manfesto. A page at the website of Doubleday's parent, Random House, refers to Goldberg and has a picture of the book's cover, but has no information about the Pantload's volume. And the Pantload's not one of the ten Goldbergs on the publisher's author roster.

At a promised 272 pages, this means that Goldberg hasn't managed to complete even a fifth of a page per day. Factoring in the huge margins, large type, bogus endnotes and eight to sixteen pages of red and black Crayola illustrations, it's probably closer to less than a tenth of a page. Of course, Goldberg's churned out much more than 272 pages worth of Corner Crap over the past four years (and that's not including his syndicated column and BSG slash fiction). So he's got no excuse for delivering his book 2 and 1/2 years late.

What makes this more mysterious is that I think it's pretty safe to assume that fans of BSG slash have considerably more exacting standards of taste and judgment than Goldberg's editor Adam "In Refutation of Nepotism" Bellow (cf. 1, 2, 3).

The Happy Confluence of Principle and Material Interest

"I heartily endorse this event or product."


We've had to turn down a couple BlogAds recently--the most recent a particularly egregious bit of union busting--so it's nice to get an advertiser expressing a sentiment I can endorse unreservedly.

If you stop calling them corrupt, I'll stop saying they aren't

To no one's surprise, Project Runway can't find herself getting worked up about the firings of US Attorneys, yet she does acknowledge, with her usual contrarian disdain for actual thought, that "the sheer intensity of the effort to make this the big story of the week is bringing out the resistance in me." Since I'm in a listing mood today, here are a few other things Ann Althouse probably doesn't give a damn about because of the "intensity of the effort" to embiggen their significance:

(1) rats shitting in brain-damaged soldiers' food
(2) climate change
(3) zombies
(4) cancer
(5) Sam Alito's non-moderate judicial philosophy (OK, she definitely doesn't care about that . . .)

Thankfully for all of us, Hilzoy isn't bored by the "intensity of the effort" to comprehend the latest steamer from the Bush administration.

Weird Lists

As a pampered academic, I don't have nearly enough to do on any given day. When I'm not lounging in my spacious, teak-floored office, snorting haughtily at the strange religious beliefs of my students, or dishing out gruel and hardtack to the research assistants who are ghost-writing my latest revisionist screed against America, I spend much of my time searching for useless information on Wikipedia.

Lately, I've taken an interest in the bizarre lists maintained on the site -- including, for example,

the List of Controversial Games (e.g., Ghettopoly)

the List of Notable Brain Tumor Patients (e.g., Eugene "Porky" Lee from Little Rascals)

the List of Famous People from Ft. Wayne, Indiana (e.g., Jenna Fischer).

and the List of Cyclones in Western Australia (the good news is that no one's died from one in twelve years Scratch that)

Who the hell compiles these lists? I mean, really. Could there possibly be someone out there with more idle time than an assistant professor at the most prestigious public university in Southeast Alaska?

OK, back to wasting the taxpayers' money.

. . . via comments and elsewhere, more great Wikipedia lists:

Fictional Pyromaniacs (via Cryptic Ned in comments)

Aliments of Unknown Etology (not to be confused with this);

List of Unusual Deaths (the latest entry is here).

Oh, my. This one just isn't right . . . (via Tom Hilton in comments)

Lamest Edit Wars (e.g., "Profootballreference.com lists Farve as having 8224 career passing attempts, while the official Packers website and NFL.com list him as having 8223. An edit war ensues over the 1 attempt leading to an editor getting indefinitely banned. Sockpuppeting followed, including "aging" accounts to circumvent semi-protection. All over 1 passing attempt... In a 16 year hall of fame career. His name is still spelled weird." Via Vance Maverick in comments.)

List of Fictional Bears (including Mr. Burns' childhood companion Bobo)

More to come, I suppose.

Judicial Conservatism and Legal Indeterminacy

I'm a little puzzled by this Sasha Volokh post, in which he cites an article by Mike Seidman pointing out that the indeterminate nature of legal materials has produced conservative results as the federal courts have become dominated by Republican appointments and then uses it as a "gotcha" against CLS scholars, warning them that "progressives who, in the name of indeterminacy, try to undermine rule-of-law norms, will find this biting them back in the end." If Volokh thinks that this would be remotely surprising to the crits, however, he doesn't understand their work. First, the indeterminacy thesis is an empirical one, and as both Volokh and Seidman seem to concede, the federal judiciary under the Bush administration has provided powerful evidence for it. I'm not inclined to agree with the strongest versions of the crit/realist argument, but as Mark Tushnet (the most important CLS scholar) has pointed out, Bush v. Gore "seems to have let critical legal studies arise like Lazarus from the grave." One would have to be incredibly naive to believe that the law would not have taken a more conservative turn had only some academics not made arguments about legal indeterminacy in obscure law review articles. Secondly, one can disagree with CLS scholars on any number of points, but one thing you certainly can't accuse them of is being unaware that legal indeterminacy can work to reactionary purposes. Indeed, the whole point of a lot of CLS scholarship is that the indeterminacy of legal principles served powerful interests and obstructed progressive social change. Despite my disagreements with CLS scholars one useful thing about the critical literature is that it serves as a reminder about how anomalous the Warren Court was in American history; people who expect the federal judiciary to reliably stand up for the rights of unpopular minorities against the powerful are likely to be disappointed more often than not.

Against the "Cohesion" Pretext

Good for Alan Simpson, who notes the empirical difficulties with the idea that if we don't indulge the ex ante bigotry of some military and political leaders it will somehow cause morale and cohesion to collapse:

Military attitudes have also shifted. Fully three-quarters of 500 vets returning from Iraq and Afghanistan said in a December Zogby poll that they were comfortable interacting with gay people. Also last year, a Zogby poll showed that a majority of service members who knew a gay member in their unit said the person's presence had no negative impact on the unit or personal morale. Senior leaders such as retired Gen. John Shalikashvili and Lt. Gen. Daniel Christman, a former West Point superintendent, are calling for a second look.

Second, 24 nations, including 12 in Operation Enduring Freedom and nine in Operation Iraqi Freedom, permit open service. Despite controversy surrounding the policy change, it has had no negative impact on morale, cohesion, readiness or recruitment. Our allies did not display such acceptance back when we voted on "don't ask, don't tell," but we should consider their common-sense example.

Third, there are not enough troops to perform the required mission. The Army is "about broken," in the words of Colin Powell. The Army's chief of staff, Gen. Peter Schoomaker, told the House Armed Services Committee in December that "the active-duty Army of 507,000 will break unless the force is expanded by 7,000 more soldiers a year." To fill its needs, the Army is granting a record number of "moral waivers," allowing even felons to enlist. Yet we turn away patriotic gay and lesbian citizens.

So plenty of countries (and Simpson's list presumably doesn't include Israel, which of course has somehow maintained a superb military while maintaining both gender and gay and lesbian integration) have openly gay people serving and this has no discernible effects whatsoever and increases the potential pool of talented recruits, and yet some people claim that American soldiers are too immature and hateful and American military leadership too incompetent for gay people to openly serve in our military they way they do in many of our allies. Why do anti-gay bigots hate America?

Great Moments in Passive Voice: Alberto Gonzales

"Mistakes were made." We'll outsource the commentary on this one to Mr. Trend.

Sully *heart* Kaus?

What's the deal with this? Kaus:

Where's "Faggot-Guy"? ... It seems like only last week that Andrew Sullivan was calling me "faggot-guy" at every available opportunity. ("[F]rom now on ... on those few occasions when his name comes up, he will have a new appellation on this blog.") He was sending me passionate emails. But today, nothing! Sullivan's brilliant running conceit has simply disappeared. ... Did he lose heart? Has he come un-unhinged? Did his new boss, David Bradley, decide that running around calling people "faggot-guy" might not be in the highest tradition of the venerable Atlantic? ... Update: The Cycle of Excitability is nearing its all-too-predictable end. He's back to calling me "Kaus." He'll be sucking up again soon! [Don't think so--ed. It's his default mode.] ... 5:17 P.M.

Ooh; passionate e-mails, and an excitable Sully who's sucking up. Hmm. Is it just my imagination, or does Mickey think that Sully is coming on to him? I'm not sure, but it kind of looks that way...

Here's a friendly bit of advice, Mickey; I don't tend to think of myself as an arbiter of male attractiveness, but I really, really, really (really!!!!) think that Sully can do better. I wouldn't worry too much about it...

Fun at the Archives

I'm in DC, working on various research. Best part of archival research is the trivial anecdotes that you come across. Found this in Special Collections at the Washington Naval Yard:

Soon after reaching the Atlantic U-100 sighted a motor vessel proceeding alone towards America and zigzagging; she was described as being about 6600 tons, apparently new, with shining paint and bright decks. Two torpedoes were fired from a submerged position and the ship heeled over and sank.

U-100 surfaced and the Captain, followed by the Quartermaster, climbed out of the conning tower. Survivors in one or more lifeboats were observed, but before the Germans had time to get close to their victim, for some unexplained reason the U-boat began to submerge. The Captain pushed the Quartermaster down the conning tower hatch and slammed it shut, remaining himself on the bridge. The water rose higher and higher and the Captain had to hang on to the periscope for his life before the U-boat surfaced again. The crew were roundly cursed by their wet Captain.

Indeed.

The wet Captain in question was Joachim Schepke, one of the most successful U-boat commanders of World War II. Boats under his command are credited with sinking 36 ships displacing a total of 153000 tons. Sadly (or happily, depending on your perspective) Schepke was crushed to death on the conning tower when U-100 was rammed by a Royal Navy destroyer... UPDATE: See comments on this point.

Also, my co-blogger should be pleased to discover that the first Canadian vessel to force the surrender of a German U-boat in World War II was none other than HMCS Moose Jaw.

Worst American Birthdays, vol. VII

If he were still living, William Joseph Casey would be enjoying his 94th birthday. Head of the SEC under Nixon and the CIA under Ronald Reagan, Casey died of pneumonia -- abetted by a malignant brain tumor and prostate cancer -- in May 1987.

Wiliam Casey directed Ronald Reagan's election campaign in 1980 and was rewarded with the directorship of an agency whose reputation had taken a severe and well-earned pounding in the post-Watergate years. On matters of foreign policy, William Casey was devoted to the “Reagan Doctrine,” which called on the US to fund insurrections along the margins of the so-called “Communist world,” including those in Afghanistan, Angola, and Nicaragua. Few of these conflicts turned out quite according to plan, and the brutality of the elements being patronized by the US did not always suit the nation's vision of itself as a moral exemplar. After Congress voted in 1984 to suspend all American financial assistance to the contra rebels in Nicaragua -- an idiosycratic constellation of groups that shared little in common beyond their willingness to violate human rights -- officials in the CIA and on the National Security Council were furious, that elected officials dared to interfere with their global ideological struggle against the Red Menace in all its guises.

Rather than accept defeat graciously, they instead devised a plan to continue funding the war, first by recruiting South Korean, Saudi and South African financial assistance, then by diverting revenue to the Central American fighters -- revenue derived, as it turned out, from illegal arms sales to Iran. Although Chief of Staff James Baker had warned that such efforts might constitute “an impeachable offense,” Casey and the rest pressed forward in 1985 and 1986. Casey introduced Oliver North to various CIA assets in Central America, contacts that enabled North to organize the illegal financial transfers that were intended to bring millions of dollars into the Nicaraguan civil war. The project was bungled, however. In a beautiful twist of fate, the illegal covert operations were disclosed on the verge of Congressional approval of $100 million in aid to the contras.

Casey took ill in December 1986 and was dead by early May. At the time this seemed like a wise move, as the prime movers in the Iran-Contra scandal all appeared to be headed for lengthy prison terms; in retrospect, Casey might have put forth more of an effort to survive the beastly disease, since even the most deserving among the conspirators emerged without too many legal blemishes. Despite the pardons and vacated convictions and short prison terms that spared these men lasting indignity, history will not be nearly so kind to Casey and others who subverted the Constitution, funded terror, retained the services of drug traffickers, and helped prolong brutal conflicts that siphoned off tens of thousands of lives on two continents.

More On Feeble Ex Post Facto Justifications For Homophobia

A comment below by R. Stanton Scott seems worth highlighting:

Those who argue that some citizens should be excluded from military service because their presence would hurt "unit cohesion" are saying that current soldiers should be able to decide with whom they serve. This is bravo sierra--the military is not a country club whose members should be able to blackball undesirables.

As a tank platoon sergeant I faced a variety of obstacles to unit cohesion, including affairs and arguments over women, unpaid gambling debts, racism, gang membership, laziness, and simple personality conflicts. The biggest one was the constant squabble between single junior enlisted troops who lived constricted lives in the barracks (daily inspections, etc), and the married soldiers who lived off post and lived much more freely (and also got time off for things like sick family members).

The point is that conflicts will always arise among any group of people large enough to complete a destructive military mission, and leaders--like General Pace--have the mission of solving these problems. This turns out to be easier than one might think, since most soldiers, even when slighted, know when they are being treated fairly and when they are not, and they know good leaders when they see them. Good leaders can create cohesive, effective units from diverse raw materials. Saying that military units cannot integrate homosexuals into cohesive units is the same as saying that our armed services have too few effective leaders.

What strikes me as most interesting is not that General Pace is comfortable classifying a non-trivial number of his own troops as immoral. It is that there is a mission that he can't or won't complete because of morality or ethics, but this mission has nothing to do with killing thousands of innocent civilians or breaking the Marine Corps he leads. It regards instead his refusal to validate sexual preferences his religion demonizes.

Who is the immoral one?

Right. It should be obvious that the solution to somebody failing to do their job because of their petty prejudices or immaturity isn't to violate other people's writes to accommodate them, but to tell them to grow up and if they can't find people who can, and supervisors willing to indulge this behavior are similarly guilty. And as I've said before, somebody who isn't willing to do his job because of his obsession with someone else's sex life isn't exactly somebody I'd be anxious to share a foxhole with. As Rob says, this "unit cohesion" stuff--which has been used to challenge not only gays but women and segregation in the military--is just a transparent pretext to justify exclusionary policies political and military leaders support for other reasons in any case.

Scenes From the Idiocracy

Just 3 days removed from almost choking to death because of an allergic reaction to nuts, after repeated requests for the vinaigrette some clown at the Hale&Hearty; applied some "Asian Peanut" dressing to my salad, which I discovered only because I happened to see the label on the side at the last minute; I don't even want to think about what would have happened if I hadn't been looking. Christ, this kind of thing can kill people, and it's not exactly a high-skill task to figure out.

Wingnut Self-Parody of the Day

Treason-in-Defense-of-Slavery Yankee. While the old newspapers and oily rags pile up in his living room, and as he passes his days eating cheese sandwiches and saving his own excrement in white plastic buckets, Bob Owens has been in a manifesto-writing mood. In his latest effort, "Death to the Leftist Insect that Preys on the Life of the People" "United Left of Defeat," Bob concludes that

[o]n a fundamental level, leftists are no longer Americans first. They nakedly place their partisan political objectives above those of the nation as a whole. . . .

They are incapable of seeing it as a victory for the Iraqi people, whom they have made abundantly clear though their choices of rhetoric and proposed legislation, are secondary citizens of the world, at best. They refuse to acknowledge the possibility of a victory in Iraq as being good for the United States, the Iraqi people, or the world at large. They have chosen sides, and they do not side with the best interests of our country, or that of other free nations.

Strong words from a man who's argued for caning the wogs when they get out of line. And coming from a fellow who . . . you know . . . loves the Confederacy and all, the "Americans first" exhalations are priceless as always.

Jonah Goldberg Is Making Sense

No, really! OK, there are some details that are problematic--I'm not sure what campaign finance reform has to do with this, and George Bush was hardly less prone to claiming to transcend partisan conflict than Hillary Clinton--but the more that the argument that "democracy is about disagreement, and you can't have the former without the latter" appears in our op-ed pages, the better. There's no stupider genre of op-eds than the Broderesque "all political problems and our horrible partisanship could be solved if we could just agree that I'm right about everything" routine.

Immoral

I'm glad that Peter Pace has made clear the reason he believes gays should be excluded from openly serving in the military. It's so much more refreshing to hear this argument than the more nebulous "gays reduce unit cohesion" argument that's been in vogue for the last fifteen years or so. According to this argument, gays reduce unit performance both by creating distrust in the unit (heterosexuals get nervous) and through developing relationships that prevent properly dispassionate analysis and action (Sarge doesn't want his boyfriend to get shot, and thus takes unnecessary risks). There's not the faintest shred of empirical support for the unit cohesion argument, but because it's so difficult to test, there's not a ton of empirical disconfirmation, either.

Much better for Pace to simply make clear that he finds homosexuals icky. The odd thing is that, in spite of this ickiness, Pace claims that he supports the "don't ask, don't tell" policy. Closted gays, apparently, aren't as icky as open gays. I suppose that God hates an Army where soldiers have purple triangles on their uniforms, but finds an Army with closeted gays acceptable. Whatever. By making clear the real reason for the exclusion of gays, Pace is helping to sound the death knell of their exclusion. Attitudes toward homosexuality are becoming more progressive in virtually every demographic, even the very conservative ones that the armed forces draw from. The attitudes that Pace displays are steadily going to grow less tenable. There's plenty of tolerance of gays in the military now; most soldiers that I've met knew that some of their comrades were gay, and almost none of them cared.

Cross-posted to TAPPED.

Reproductive Freedom And State Interests

I have a post at TAPPED about the strange new conservative trend toward talking about abortion as weakening America's precious baby supply, an argument that (assuming conservatism wants to preserve any viability at all)--even if it were actually accurate--would obviously prove too much, since birth control is a rather greater brake on fertility rates. I use this to discuss attempts by conservatives to "pull the thread" of Roe without upsetting the Griswold line of cases, which I think usually fails. Since I'm having trouble getting the comments to work and this has come up once before, I thought it was worth explaining this in more detail. A commenter says:

I think that argument is somewhat facile, simply because the main difference between Roe v. Wade and Griswold is the existence of a competing interest -- the putative child's -- in abortion cases. That's not an argument that was advanced to any significant degree in Roe, but it's one that's likely to be advanced in any potential repudiation of Roe, specifically for the reason that it would avoid repudiating Griswold.

In theory, this is true: someone can acknowledge that abortion is a fundamental right--which it logically must be, if contraception is--but that is trumped by a more powerful state interest. But, in practice, this is rarely the case. None of the past or current anti-Roe Supreme Court Justices have actually made this argument: Rehnquist, Scalia, Thomas, and White instead argued that a woman's right to choose an abortion is not a fundamental liberty interest at all. (White actually joined Griswold, making his position hopelessly incoherent.) And, actually, this makes sense, because attempts to "pull the thread" will fail. Anti-Roe arguments, in practice, depend on taking asserted legislative ends at face value and not analyzing the fit between the policy and the stated ends--precisely the opposite of the strict scrutiny applying Griswold requires. Let's assess the two potentially countervailing interests that could trump fundamental reproductive rights:

• Protecting a woman's health. While this is certainly a compelling state interest, it is obvious that abortion criminalization is a grossly overbroad means of achieving these ends. The legitimate state interest of ensuring the safety of abortions hardly requires them to be banned altogether. Moreover, this justification runs into the obvious problem that abortion is much safer than bringing a child to term. If reproductive freedom is a fundamental right, this isn't a remotely hard question.
  
• Protecting Fetal Life. This is the somewhat more viable enterprise; one can imagine a moral conception of the fetus that could plausibly trump even a fundamental liberty interest. However, it is clear from the way abortion laws are actually written and enforced that abortion laws do not reflect anything like such a consensus. If fetal life was protected, these laws would be strongly enforced, women who got abortions would face serious jail time, juries would convict doctors for performing abortions absent injury, affluent women would not have de facto exemptions from the law, etc. But none of these things are true. Once we stop taking state assertions at face value--and if a fundamental right is involved, we cannot--the fit between the purported interest and the construction and application of abortion bans is too implausible to sustain abortion bans. Legislation delegating these decisions to panels of doctors under vague standards fares even worse in this respect.
  

Given actual abortion laws, as opposed to abortion laws in some abstract universe, one can have both Griswold and Roe or neither, period.

Herodotus vs. Thucydides

I think that Thomas Geogeghan is a bit unfair to Thucydides:

The strong will crush the weak. If ever there's a case for pre-emptive war, it is all there in Thucydides. It's a world in which there is no world opinion, or international law. That kind of thing's for sissies, the neocon's would say Set up those prisons in Guantanamo. They don't cry over these things in Thucydides. You focus on being strong.

[...]

First, he was writing in Fifth Century B.C. There was no such thing as world opinion. There was no mass media. There was no CNN, or UN, or anything like the Hague. We were not wired up to each other. And there were no roadside bombs. What the neocons miss is that things that the Spartans could get away with in The Peloponessian Wars, they wouldn't even try to get away with now. It's not that we're "soft" in the twenty-first century. But our hard power is so dependent on our soft power that there are things a "realist" would have done once that anyone with a sense of reality wouldn't do now.

Right; I suppose that someone could have that interpretation of Thucydides if they only thing they read was the Melian Dialogue. In the context of the rest of the book, it makes no sense whatsoever. Thucydides makes quite clear, over and over and over again, that the Athenians and Spartans do not live in a purely anarchical international system. Norms matter even to the Athenians; there are even multiple ways of reading the Melian Dialogue. Certainly, we are supposed to understand that the Spartans took the general guidelines of international conduct more seriously than the Athenians, even if they were often just as ruthless. And the Spartans won, after all...

Part of the problem is that neoconservative readings of Thucydides tend to be relentlessly terrible. Once you convince yourself that Thucydides thought that they Sicilian Expedition was a good idea, I guess invading Iraq looks downright sensible...

I'll confess, also, that I'm unsympathetic with Geogeghan's argument (that we need to read more Herodotus and less Thucydides) because I simply loathe Herodotus. He may have travelled a lot, but it's clear that he simply made up a lot of stuff from questionable second hand accounts.

Great Moments in "Accurate Language"

Via Bitch, Ph.D., we read about the latest uninformed plea for "accurate language" to describe Plan B.

Behold:

"Plan B (the morning after pill) “can lower the risk of pregnancy by up to 89 percent if taken within 72 hours of unprotected sex."

So states a sentence matter-of-factly in various AP articles today regarding a woman’s complaint against the Kroger Co. because a pharmacist refused to provide her with Plan B, the massive dose of birth control pills permitted for sale by the FDA (thanks to the new FDA chief appointed by Bush) that either 1) destroys the fetus immediately after conception by preventing it from attaching to the womb, flushing it out of the mother’s system, 2) prevents the egg from joining with the sperm, or 3) stops the egg from being released (these three descriptions can be found on the Plan B website). The mainstream media-censored description of Plan B never mentions that one of the three ways Plan B works is to destroy the life of the fetus. This is one of the most clear-cut examples of media bias.

One could develop a pretty good drinking game around this paragraph -- if we figure one swig of Beefeater per factual error, I'd be filled with a gentle, undeserved love for humanity by the end of that first run-on sentence. As Bitch points out, Rachel Alexander can't even read the Duramed website correctly, instead insisting that anti-choice fantasy (e.g., "destroys the fetus") substitute for a clinically accurate account of the drug -- a drug that is, of course, not a "massive dose of birth control pills" but rather an elevated (two-pill) dose of progesterone that does not "destroy the fetus" because there is no such critter to destroy.

More interesting to me is the deliberate inversion of Plan B's effects. As a high dose of progesterone, its primary (and only clinically-demonstrated) effect is to prevent ovulation; instead, Alexander gives primary emphasis to an effect that conservates have simply invented to attack a drug they won't condone for their own peculiar reasons. Along the way, we're even reminded of the scientacular "statistic" -- a popular one among the anti-choice crowd, drawn as it is from an unreliable data set -- that "83 percent" of women who go through abortion procedures later experience "regret."

Taken on its own the post is an illiterate throw-away, unworthy of mention except for the extent to which it expresses a symptomatic wingnut hostility to anything resembling a sober, accurate description of Plan B. Alexander even goes so far as to chide Duramed for not including "pictures" to illustrate the pills' effects. I can only assume that the photos she has in mind were last seen waving on a stick outside a clinic in Omaha.

l'etat, c'est lui

The latest from one of the guys McCain consults:

What's more, Bush won't be able to "stay out of it." Others will continue to place his White House at the very heart of it, as the Libby appeals move forward. After all, Libby's lawyers foolishly (or perhaps desperately) introduced at trial the notion that Libby was a "fall guy"--which would seem to legitimize the notion there was a conspiracy, of which Libby was a part, though a less important part than others. Each time a legal paper is filed, a new anti-Bush news cycle will erupt. So if the White House wants to minimize opportunities for fresh speculation about how the Libby case is part of some broader conspiracy, the president should act now.

So this is where "for-the-good-of-the-country" arguments come to, I suppose. As far as Kristol can tell, the most compelling argument in favor pardoning Libby -- aside from the obvious claim that "there was no underlying crime" -- rests on the craven wish to avoid "a new anti-Bush spin cycle." Even more amazingly, Kristol insists toward the end of the piece that a pardon for Scooter Libby would "reinvigorate" the President's strongest supporters, who are "demoralized" by the conviction.

. . . Kristol link fixed . . .

. . . and for the easily confused, Tom Hilton offers a nice chart guaranteed to keep you momentarily smarter than the Washington Post editorial board . . .

Logan International Airport Blogging

There are, of course, many reasons to watch NASCAR, as is clear when you're stuck in a venue where it's being shown; it's excruciatingly dull, it goes on forever, and the sound (both the whine of the engines and the commentary) intensely irratating when you're trying to watch a real sporting event at the same place. From my narrow perspective, however, what really sucks is that the NASCAR crowd overwhelmed security at the Vegas airport, causing me to miss my flight. Fortunately, I was able to get the last flight out to Boston and connect thorugh there, but ugh. Our guests can feel free to keep contributing today: I won't be back until this aft.

One thing learned: ambien + these headphones = a red eye on which even I can sleep.

Smart Money is on the Pac-10 Tourney Champs...

Remember to sign up for the LGM Tourney Challenge.

ESPN Tournament Challenge
Group Name: Lawyers, Guns and Money
Password: zevon

Worst American Birthdays, vol. VI

Former Interior Secretary Gail Norton turns 53 years old today. When the history of the Bush administration clown show is at last compiled, our memories of Norton's record will likely be diminished by the spectacular failures of the president himself -- to say nothing of Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Colin Powell, Douglas Feith, Paul Wolfowitz, and the rest of the unlikable lot.

Yet Norton's five years of open hostility to any notion of the public good should not be overlooked simply because she played no direct role in bringing on the worst foreign policy disaster in American history (though she did once argue that Saddam Hussein was enriched by American environmentalists who opposed tapping the Arctic for more drilling). An advocate of what she called "New Environmentalism" and a self-professed lover of nature, Norton loves it even more when it is filled with lead, nickel, oil, natural gas, and other resources that might enrich the industries she once represented as a lobbyist and attorney. Her devotion to states' rights was pronounced -- in a 1996 speech to a Denver think tank, she lamented the loss of the Confederacy's vision of limited federal power. Slavery, she observed, was merely a "bad fact" that should not have ruined the broader confederate vision of state autonomy.

As Secretary of the Interior, Norton zealously promoted "wise use" policies that she learned from the most ferocious anti-environmental, free-market ideologues who emerged in the American West during the 1970s and early 1980s -- including the apocalyptic loon James Watt. Under her "stewardship," America's public lands were opened to wasteful timber harvests; roadless rules were stricken from the books; an army of snowmobiling yahoos was unleashed in Yellowstone; and the enforcement of the Endangered Species Act was curtailed so dramatically that it ceased to offer any meaningful protections to threatened wildlife. Moreover, Secretary Norton continued to oversee the venal management of American Indian tribal lands, where mining, timber and oil leases had drawn hundreds of millions of dollars in reventue that the Department of the Interior had simply lost. In late 2001, Interior's computers were ordered disconnected from the internet by a federal judge who was unimpressed with the department's ability to safeguard their system from hackers.

Norton left the Department of the Interior in early 2006. She now spends her time feasting on grizzly bear, bull trout, and condor eggs.

Sunday Deposed Monarch Blogging: House of Osman

The House of Osman began as one of many small noble families that ruled the Turkic peoples during their migration west around the end of the first millenia CE. The Osmans steadily accrued power and influence, and in the disruption following the Mongolian invasions established its lands as an independent power center in Anatolia. Althought he did not claim the title of Sultan, Osman I, who lived at the end of the 13th and beginning of the 14th century, is understood to be the dynastic founder of the Ottoman Empire. After securing his territory from Turkic rivals, Osman looked to the crumbling Byzantine Empire, which the Osman's would eat at for the next two centuries. This would grant them access not only to Europe, but also gave the resources to extend their power in the Islamic world.

Critical in the expansion of Ottoman power was the victory at the Field of Blackbirds in 1389, which helped stem Serbian power and ensure Ottoman access to the corpse of the Byzantine Empire. Sultan Murad I died on the battlefield and was replaced by his son, Bayezid I. As was common custom at the time, Bayezid had his brother strangled upon his ascension in the wake of the battle. Succession in the House of Osman did not operate on the principles of primogeniture, seniority, or even on the selection of the current Sultan, but rather most often depended on a free-for-all between sons upon the death of the Sultan. The new Sultan would often, although not always, follow up his ascension with the murder of any remaining brothers. Over time this practice, which of course proved quite destructive both within the family and without, was replaced by a general preference for the principle of seniority. Unfortunately for Bayezid I, the invasions of the Tartar under Tamerlane prevented him from following up his success in Kosovo. The Tartar captured Bayezid I, and although the story is probably apocraphyl, it is said that Tamerlane used the Sultan as a footstool.

The disruptions associated with the Tartar invasions weakened the enemies of the Osman's more than the Osmans themselves. In 1453, Sultan Mehmed II captured Constantinople, putting the Byzantine Empire (and, by extension, the ancient Roman Empire) to effective end. The last Byzantine Emperor was presumably killed in the fighting, as he was last seen throwing himself into hand-to-hand combat after the breaching of the city walls. Upon the fall of the city, Constantinople became the new capitol of the Ottoman Empire. The Osman's continued their expansion into Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East, reaching the gates of Vienna in 1529. The Empire reached its apogee under Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent, who reigned between 1520 and 1566. Periodically, Sultans asserted the title Caliph of Islam, although this was not used with any regularity.

Of course, ever empire that rises must eventually fall. The growing borders of the Empire extended its responsibilities beyond that which was economically and bureaucratically efficient. Ottoman military forces became victims of their own success, as tactics and formation became hidebound and increasingly vulnerable to military advances in the West. The succession process tended to leave young (and, eventually, older) men without any education or policy experience, and incited unrest and dissension. The Sultan would typically have an enormous harem with many children, which created a poor incentive structure for the training of any given successor or for vigorous political action. Although the Empire experienced several periods of rejuvenation, the period from 1566 on can be understood as one of long, slow decline. This decline accelerated in the 19th century, when the superiority of Western military practice became evident.

The Ottoman Empire slowly shed its external territories and influence over the course of the 19th century. It lost Greece in 1829, Egypt in the Napoleonic Wars, Cyprus in 1879, and various parts of the Balkans througout the century. Further efforts at reform helped lead to revolution and the curtailment of royal power. In 1908, the "Young Turks" seized the reins of policy. The Empire joined the Central Powers in late 1914, and although it saw some initial success, eventually suffered dramatic defeats in the Middle East. The end of the war resulted in the loss of virtually all remaining European territories and most Asian territories outside the Turkish peninsula. Sultan Mehmed VI accepted an Allied peace plan that threatened to partition Turkey, enraging Turkish nationalists. After much jockeying for power, the Sultan boarded the British battleship Malaya on November 17, 1922, and fled to Malta.

Seven men have headed the House of Osman since the end of the Empire. The latest is Ertugrul Osman V, ten years old when the last Sultan fled. Since 1945, Ertugrul Osman has lived in a two bedroom apartment on Lexington Avenue around 70th Street. Reportedly, he and his wife pay $350 in rent. The Sultan still has some political pull; when they roof in his bathroom collapsed, he contacted Mayor Bloomberg and a crew of city workers repaired the damage in short order. Ertugrul Osman returned to Turkey in 1992, and was granted Turkish citizenship. Chances for a restoration of the monarchy appear extremely grim, as Ertugrul Osman has demonstrated little interest in pursuing political power. Turkey also has no political movement calling for return of the monarchy worth noting, as the Osmans are understood to be antithetical to Turkish nationalism, rather than an integral aspect of it. Nevertheless, Ertugrul Osman V seems happy enough.

Trivia: What country has had only two emperors and only four years of imperial rule in the last 185 years?

"Together at Last."

A perfect storm of stoopid.

Though much of the episode is precoccupied with the question of Althouse's "feminism," for my money the defining moment comes when Reynolds' wife observes that "lefty blogs" are enamored of Bill Clinton and "people they perceive to be higher than them or something."

Did He Disintegrate, Like in Buffy?

Whoa.

Deceased Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic, who died in captivity in Haag last year standing on trial for War Crimes in a UN War Crimes tribunal, still seem to haunt the Serbian nation.

Recently his grave in the eastern Serbian town of Pozarevac was desecrated in a bizarre incident, when Serbian vampire hunters in accordance with old folklore and tradition wanted to make sure the late president remained dead, and drove a three-foot wooden stake into the grave and through his heart.

Via Fistful of Euros.

Big Media Battlepanda

Oh, my.

EDACT conducted a telephone survey of 1,009 Taiwanese men and then classified each man's manhood in one of four groups -- cucumbers, bananas, peeled bananas and conjac jelly.

Of course in the end, it's all about the drugs.

Speaking of which, the TheraFlu is calling. Combined with a gallon of coffee, it makes a pretty good antidepressant.

Creepiest. Ad. Ever.

Dick Vitale for Hooters.

The prospect of seeing it again is almost enough to keep me away from the Bellagio Sports Book. Almost.

...don't blame me for the embed. A commenter made me do it.

Further Evidence that Chess is Among the Most Noble of Human Pursuits

Garry Kasparov.

Mr. Kasparov, 43, is not Mr. Putin’s only critic, but he may be the most prominent. And he has brought to oppositional politics the same energy and aggression that characterized his chess, attacking Mr. Putin and the Kremlin — or the regime, as he repeatedly calls it — with language rarely spoken so bluntly in Russia.

"This regime is getting out of touch with the real world," he said. "It’s a deadly combination of money, power and blood — and impunity."

Such attacks have drawn the scrutiny of the authorities, though so far nothing worse; someone who sounded angry that Mr. Kasparov had given up chess for politics attacked him with a chessboard in 2005. ("I am lucky," he said at the time, "that the popular sport in the Soviet Union was chess and not baseball.")

Just try not to get yourself killed, Garry. Seriously.

Unfortunately, his old rival Anatoly Karpov has developed from being an apologist for the Soviet state to becoming an apologist for Putin.

"I don't think [Kasparov] has a big future in politics. I don't think he has traveled much in Russia. Russia is a state within a state. To understand the population of Russia, you need to know the areas of the country, you need an understanding of the people and their interests," he said. "He knows Moscow. He has an understanding of the Russian elite, but not of the people of Russia. This is his problem." ...

"In general, I believe Putin has [done] the necessary things to keep Russia as one country. Putin needs strong moves to keep the country as one," he said. "There is some criticism that he is centralizing power, but in Russia, if you don't centralize power, you have the risk of losing the country."

Worst American Birthdays, vol. V

George Lincoln Rockwell, founder of the American Nazi Party and Hatenanny Records; author of racist paperweights such as This Time in the World and White Power; failed gubernatorial candidate in Virginia; assassinated outside a laundromat in August 1967.

Friday Cat Blogging

Amy Carter and Misty Malarky Ying Yang, 15 August 1977.

More Rubble

Today is the anniversary of the firebombing of Tokyo during World War II, when hundreds of American B-29s incinerated 16-17 square miles of the city and turned 100,000 people -- civilians mostly -- into ash. Placed along side the sustained Chinese Japanese raids on Chongqing, the German assault on Guernica, and the destruction of Dresden by British and American pilots, the March 1945 raids on Tokyo must surely rank as a low-point in human history.

They are, however, unjustly overlooked, eclipsed by the devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki five months later and diminished by the thoroughly merciless theater of the Pacific. Fog of War probably did more to resuscitate the memory of Tokyo's destruction among Americans, as Robert McNamara reminded us that by any measure these events must be counted as war crimes. In a single night, the United States inflicted a toll of death equal to one quarter of the number of Americans who perished over the course of the entire war.

A French reporter named Robert Guillain described the unthinkable scene:

They set to work at once, sowing the sky with fire. Bursts of light flashed everywhere in the darkness like Christmas trees, lifting their flame high into the night, then fell back to earth in whistling bouquets of jagged flame. Barely quarter of an hour after the raid started, the fire, whipped by the wind, began to scythe its way through the density of that wooden city. As they fell, cylinders scattered a kind of flaming dew that skidded along the roofs, setting fire to everything it splashed, and spreading a wash of dancing flames everywhere. The first version of napalm. Roofs collapsed under the bombs’ impact, and within minutes the frail houses of wood and paper were aflame, lighted from the inside like paper lanterns.

. . . . The inhabitants stayed heroically put as the bombs dropped, faithfully obeying the order that each family defend its own home. But how could they fight the fires with that wind blowing and when a single house might be hit by ten or even more of the bombs, each weighing up to 6.6 pounds, that were raining down by the thousands? As they fell, cylinders scattered a kind of flaming dew that skittered along the roofs, setting fire to everything it splashed and spreading a wash of dancing flames everywhere - the first version of napalm, of dismal fame. The meager defenses of those thousands of amateur firemen - feeble jets of hand-pumped water, wet mats and sand to be thrown on the bombs when one could get close enough to their terrible heat were completely inadequate. Roofs collapsed under the bombs' impact and within minutes the frail houses of wood and paper were aflame, lighted from the inside like paper lanterns. The hurricane-force wind puffed up great clots of flame and sent burning planks planing through the air to fell people and set fire to what they touched. Flames from a distant cluster of houses would suddenly spring up close at hand, traveling at the speed of a forest fire. Then screaming families abandoned their homes; sometimes the women had already left, carrying their babies and dragging crates or mattresses. Too late: the circle of fire had closed off their street. Sooner or later, everyone was surrounded by fire.

...update by Rob; I wrote a bit about the Tokyo Fire Raid here.

Sully on Kaus

From now on, I'll be outsourcing all Mickey Kaus bashing to Andrew Sullivan.

VM S.3 (various spoilers)

I haven't minded the more atomic structure of Veronica Mars season 3. While watching the first and second seasons, I thought that many of the linkages between episodes felt contrived, especially in the second. The plot in season 3, while less integral to each episode, seemed to flow a lot more naturally. Indeed, the weakest episdoes this season have been the most plot heavy. Really, who didn't realize that a) the evil grad student had murdered the Dean, and b) that he would reveal himself to Veronica through the class discussion? It was telegraphed, and genuinely weak. Then again, I think that every season finale has been weak. I'm reminded of a critique I heard of Ocean's Twelve. It's interesting enough to see how the caper was pulled off, but the revelation didn't proceed organically; we couldn't figure out that they had already stolen the egg until Soderbergh decided to show us the secret stuff that we couldn't have known about before. Unlike a good mystery, we couldn't figure things out on our own. It's been the same way with VM; the season finale has tied everything together, but twisted the plotting such that the season as a whole doesn't naturally lead up to the conclusion.

Far more troubling is that the depiction of student groups comes straight out of PCU. I understand that a television show has to have conflict, and that one as complex as Veronica Mars needs to have some intrigue, but I'm pretty sure that the number of campus feminist groups that decide to stage rapes of their members is close to zero. And after the dour, humourless feminists come the almost as dour animal rights activists...

It's remarkable that, even with all of these flaws, the show remains watchable. Kristen Bell and Enrico Colantoni are so good (and so good with each other) that I'm willing to ignore the problems and just enjoy myself.

... to be sure, I don't mean to say that I prefer season 3 to either season 1 or season 2; season 3 is weak, but the atomic structure isn't the real problem. It has more, I think, to do with the clumsiness of the move from high school to college, a move that very few shows have accomplished successfully.

Friday Cat Blogging... Nelson

The "Privacy" Dodge

Matt is right about this. Now, it must be said that when it comes to a candidate's personal "family values" I'm strictly of the "Nice guy? I don't give a shit. Good father? Fuck you! Go home and play with your kids" school. Personally, while there are many good reasons not to want Rudy to be president, the fact that he's a jerk and bad husband and bad father is not, to me, one of them. You may remember this from the "Liberals should like Sam Alito because he's nice to his wife and likes baseball" routine. George W. Bush is a much better husband and father than FDR or LBJ were, William Rehnquist a much nicer person than William Douglas, and so on and so on and so on. If it's not entirely accurate to say that there's no relationship between being a nice person and being a good president (or Supreme Court Justice or whatever), certainly the correlation is weak enough that you'd be crazy to put any real weight on it. When assessing candidates, "character" is bascially a Latin word meaning "bullshit."

Having said all this, though, you can't have it both ways. Either the fact that you're a family man matters, or it doesn't. Giuliani can't use his family as a campaign prop and then squeal about his "privacy" when the rather more unpleasant aspects of his domestic life come to light. If he thought it mattered that he was a good husband and father, then it's fair game for people to bring up the fact that he isn't.

LGM Tournament Challenge

All,

It's about time for the third annual Lawyers, Guns and Money Tournament Challenge. As is tradition, winner gets a free lifetime subscription to LGM, and a Certificate of Championship-ness, suitable for framing. Here are the details:

ESPN Tournament Challenge
Group Name: Lawyers, Guns and Money
Password: zevon

"It's not just wrong, it's stupid"

God knows there's no shortage of Bush administration perpetrated outrages, the worst of which involve people dying hellish deaths. And so from that perspective this one may seem minor. But it's important: it's going to be up to the historians to tell the full story of just what the hell these lunatics in the White House were up to while in office. But who can doubt that the last thing Bush will ever want is a thorough investigation of his record?

President George W. Bush’s 2001 executive order restricted the release of presidential records by giving sitting presidents the power to delay the release of papers indefinitely, while extending the control of former presidents, vice presidents and their families. It also changed the system from one that automatically released documents 30 days after a current or former president is notified to one that withholds papers until a president specifically permits their release.

Today the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform is scheduled to discuss a new bill that would overturn Mr. Bush’s order, said a committee spokeswoman, Karen Lightfoot. The sponsors, who include the committee chairman, Henry A. Waxman, Democrat of California, hope to bring the bill to the floor of the House next week.

Allen Weinstein, the archivist of the United States, said yesterday that the order was not being used to prevent presidential papers from reaching the public, but that obviously “it has been increasing the time and delays, which are endemic.” The backlog of requests for documents now extends up to five years.

This story is also just a beautiful microcosm of how the Bushites do business. Look at this:

“There was a fair, reasonable, orderly, clear, sensible and workable process for presidential records in place during the 1990s,” which Mr. Bush’s executive order “overturned and replaced with the opposite,” Mr. Blanton testified. It “is not just wrong, it’s stupid.”

The 1978 Presidential Records Act, part of the post-Watergate reforms, clearly gave the American public ownership of presidential papers, said the historian Robert Dallek, whose latest book, “Nixon and Kissinger: Partners in Power,” is being published next month. But Mr. Bush’s executive order, he said, has had the effect of returning ownership to presidents and their heirs.

The transference of public property to private hands, the obsession with secrecy, the creation of a huge giant mess that someone else will have to clean up, the totally reckless lack of concern for the consequences of one's actions... hold on, I think I've heard this story before.

"It's not just wrong, it's stupid." Pithy.

(Also at Whiskey Fire)

Hey, Everyone Keep Your Fingers Crossed For Steve Gilliard, Okay?

The latest post on his health problems is kind of scary. And while other people have been keeping his blog going since he's been sick, it just isn't the same.

Sure, Go Ahead And Confess.

I don't much care, really, if Scooter Libby is pardoned or not; while he certainly deserves it, there's no particular good that will come of his actually going to jail. But when people talk about it, I'd really like them to recognize what a pardon means: it's Bush saying: "Yes, Libby's a felon. He lied to investigators to block their investigation of a crime. But it was a crime I ordered, and he was working for me -- either acting directly under orders, or at least trying to protect the political interests of my administration. I've got the power to protect my people from the consequences of the criminal things they do in my service, and I'm exercising it."

That's what all of this "he was a fall guy" sympathy for Libby that makes a pardon look reasonable is -- it's not that what he did wasn't criminal, it's that he was acting on behalf of his superiors, and it seems unjust that he should suffer for it. And a pardon confirms that: if Libby were acting criminally on his own behalf, there'd be no reason to pardon him. By pardoning him, Bush takes ownership of Libby's crime. (also at Unfogged.)

Blog Against Sexism Day

Plane to catch, so I will outsource to The Left, which means that in a way I did kind of contribute original material...

Well, Uncritical Iraq War Supporters Certainly Have Sat On Many Metaphorical Bayonets

Recently, I wondered about the reliability of Glenn Reynolds's claim--invoked yet again--that Talleyrand 1)said that "you can do anything with bayonets, except sit on them," and 2)that he actually meant this as an endorsement of the Green Lantern Theory Of Geopolitics. Jim Henley answers:

What bayonets are genuinely good for is stabbing people and threatening them, unless they’ve got a bayonet and a longer reach or, worse yet, ammo. The thing is, stabbing people and threatening them is a very tiny subset of all possible human actions and interactions. The internets are not good for getting the full context of Talleyrand’s remarks, but he appears to have meant it as a caution against overreliance on military power. He was foreign minister of a government conceived in high ideals, birthed in terror and ruined, at the end, by the conviction that attacking, and attacking first, was the only appropriate response to every foreign risk. In his own way, Talleyrand himself was trying to point out how little bayonets are good for. He was talking to Napoleon, but he might have been talking to Glenn Reynolds, albeit no more successfully.

This isn't surprising. But, at any rate, it's all beside the point; even if Talleyrand did mean that military force can accomplish anything, it means that Talleyrand once made an exceptionally stupid argument, as the Iraq War is demonstrating so tragically.

Go Blink Yourself

She's mad. What else can you say?

Scott deals with the substance of Althouse's current lunacy down here, referencing Jill's post here and the WaPo story here. See also Lindsay.

So let's take Althouse's wrongheadedness as demonstrated. I'd instead like to highlight the more surreal aspect of the affair.

Althouse, in all seriousness, or what passes for it at her site, contrasts the appalling treatment she's received online to that received by these law students. Here is her account of how she has suffered:

There is a popular blog where that [being name-stolen in a comically obvious fashion, with no intent to deceive anyone as to the commenter's identity as not-really-Althouse, in the comments section of a comedy blog] is done to me in the comments and openly encouraged. As I noted here, the blogger in question flatly refused to do anything about it....

Lindsay Beyerstein is more upset than I am about the fact that there is a lot of loose talk about peopleon the internet -- though presumably not about the dumb, loose talk about me on her own site. She fails to reveal what repressive remedies she has in mind to keep the internet from chattering. But I hope she'll at least do that "more speech" thing and condemn that blog where they impersonate me all the time -- or does she think I deserve it?

(This is all to do with this thing on Sadly No.)

And here's Jill on what happened to her:

I’ve written about AutoAdmit before, when I found out that they were posting numerous pictures of me, making comments about raping and hate-fucking me, and debating whether or not I was fuckable or a stupid fat bitch.

Like I said, Althouse is simply mad.

Oh, no wait, her blog is "performance art." Which is really just the polite way of saying "you are doing something strange and disturbing and I would prefer not to look at it anymore, thank you very much."

I'll Worry About Widespread Union Violence When You Show Me The Police Reports

The House passed the Employee Free Choice Act last week, which if signed into law will allow workers to organize when over 50% of a workforce signs cards indicating that they support the formation of a union ("card check"), without the subsequent NLRB sponsored secret ballot election that employers are now entitled to demand.

Like pretty much everyone else who generally supports the labor movement, I think this is a wonderful idea (I doubt it'll make it through the Senate, and if it does it'll be vetoed, but it's the right thing to do.) NLRB elections are a long drawn out process that provide scope for employers to intimidate workers and illegally fire organizers -- under these circumstances organizing becomes next thing to impossible. The card check process, on the other hand, is simple, fast, and much less easily manipulated -- it gives unions a fair shot. If anything's going to reverse the decline in private-sector union membership, card check organization is it.

The reaction from those who are less enthusiastically pro-labor, on the other hand, has been between dubious and hostile. The problem they see with card check organization is the danger that workers will be intimidated into signing cards for fear of violent retaliation from organizers if they refuse. One response to this is that in the US today, intimidation by management is a significant problem, and intimidation by unions really isn't, as demonstrated by a study that's been going around showing that there's less intimidation fom union organizers than from management under any circumstances, and less intimidation from either union organizers or management in card check elections than in NLRB secret ballot elections. The response has been (and it's a fair one) that it's one smallish study, and by itself doesn't say much.

A better response, I think, to concerns that workers will be violently intimidated by organizers to sign up with a union is that card check is the law right now. Any organizing campaign now has to go through the card check stage before the workers are entitled to a secret ballot election, and failure at that stage is fatal to the campaign. So organizers now have the same motive and opportunity for violent intimidation that they would under the EFCA scheme -- the signed cards are a sine qua non for a successful organizing campaign, and the organizers know exactly who has signed. Any violent intimidation to be expected under the new regime should already be happening now, at pretty much the same level of intensity you'd expect under the new regime -- secret ballot elections would have fewer successful unions, but they wouldn't be likely to involve less union-sponsored violence.

Now, I'm not going to commit myself to the position that there has never been violent intimidation of workers by union organizers, but I will say that I haven't seen reporting on it in the couple of decades I've been following labor news. Whatever union sponsored violence in organizing campaigns goes on now, it appears to be infrequent enough that law enforcement is completely on top of it; given that the EFCA should reduce management intimidation without having any significant reason to increase union intimidation, then, I'd consider it an unmixed good. (Also at Unfogged.)

Misogynist Enabler of the Day

Ann Althouse.

I've been through this before, but the idea that we can assume fully "rational" employers who will infer nothing from this kind of shaming other than "these women are hot!" is living in some alternate universe. As Jill says, "[f]or women who aren’t as public as I am, whose names don’t bring up almost 2,000 Google hits, this could very well be the first thing an employer comes across. And middle-aged Big Law attorneys may not be the most savvy people in the world when it comes to internet communities. They see a thread talking about the promiscuity of a woman they’re considering hiring, and that raises red flags. They see a link to a contest, where that woman’s smiling pictures are on first glance it appears that she fully consented to participate, and it might be a deal-breaker. While, from a feminist perspective, I think it’s silly that participation in a beauty contest can make or break your job prospects, the reality is that it can." Of course. Many professional people read profound significance into the most superficial characteristics (see the works of Ann Althouse, passim.) The involuntary beauty contests on the boards in question are extremely creepy, and for law firms to look at them in making hiring decisions is disgraceful but to pretend that it won't happen is crazy.

...Lindsay: "What rational employer would care what anonymous twerps on a message board said about a woman's body? No rational employer would.* However, as the entire history of civilization illustrates, people are sometimes, uh, less than rational when it comes to human sexuality and gossip pertaining thereto. If this story is any indication, law firms don't make their hiring decisions rationally." Indeed.

...Julia (in comments):

I think maybe I’m confused. This is the same Ann Althouse who started a raging blog war over a woman wearing a sweater that fit in an online picture because by having a picture posted in which she was wearing a sweater that fit she was sexualizing her image and causing herself not to be taken seriously to the point where Ann Althouse and her commenters were totally justified in making blowjob jokes?

She can’t figure out what the problem is with having bathing suit pictures explicitly linked to your professional career in an online contest?

I wonder how her law students deal with her working backwards from the results she prefers approach. Must make case law awfully complicated.

Yeah, it's shocking that she would defend Bush v. Gore.

Why Buy The Cock When You Can Get the Wake-up Call For Free? The Sequel

A brilliant post by Belle Waring (but I repeat myself) about the crude reductionism and misogynist (and, for that matter, misandrist) double standards of Laura Sessions Stepp and her even more reactionary admirers. This is as good a summary as you can find:

It always goes back to two points: a strong belief that men are slavering idiots ruled by the tyrannical and capricious whims of their cocks, and a deep conviction women don’t like having sex. The first point is something which, as many have pointed out, is a much bleaker condemnation of men than anything you are likely to get from an actual feminist...The second point, that women don’t like sex, is an undercurrent in every discussion of this type. Not even an undercurrent: a foundation stone for the whole creaky apparatus.

I've discussed this before with respect to Leon Kass, who takes this well beyond the point of self-parody, but this is exactly correct: unless you assume that women don't really like sex, but use it strictly as a tool to get material things from men who are apparently assumed to have no interest in female companionship and the solace of long-term relationships otherwise, the whole argument fails. Which, given that these arguments are in fact transparently false, is kind of a problem. And even if one assumes that in these particular social conditions men, on average, have a greater interest in casual sex (which is far less than is necessary if you're going to argue that casual sex is bad for women), as Belle says there's no reason whatsoever to assume that this is a natural condition. We don't know how women would act in conditions of gender equality because nothing remotely like this exists. "What would a world look like in which women who had sex whenever and with whomever they want were never called sluts? Never judged by strangers and friends? What would it be like if girls were never told that they had to be gatekeepers for their bodies, defenders of castle walls that are always under assault by men wanting sex? Not to put too fine a point on it, what would the world be like if there wasn’t the pervasive threat of sexual violence?" All excellent questions, and ones that Stepp and Douthat would prefer remain unasked.

A couple of additional points. First, staunch feminist Ann Althouse, seemingly untroubled by Stepp's egregious double standards and profoundly reactionary conceptions of gender and sexuality, claims that Stepp "irks some critics who don't want to hear that casual sex may hurt a young woman's heart." The first problem is discussed above: maybe, just maybe, some of thus hurt is caused by the fact that women who engage in casual hook-ups are often stigmatized in ways that men aren't. But, in addition, of course casual hookups can "hurt someone's heart." You know what else can hurt a young woman's heart? Marriage. Long-term relationships. Not getting laid at all. You know can also experience emotional trauma from all of these things? Men. Nobody's saying that freedom and equality means a world free from pain. Freedom and equality means being free to make good and bad choices, to experiment is ways that will sometimes go well and sometimes not. I don't think most people think that casual hookups are unproblematic; rather, I think that they judge that in many cases it's preferable to celibacy or committing to a life-long committed relationship when you're 20. This strikes me as a quite reasonable thing to believe.

The second thing I don't understand about this argument is the strange either/or assumptions it makes about people's romantic and sexual lives. Stepp seems to think that people can choose love or uncommitted sexuality, hookups or Serious Relationships. But there's no reason whatsoever that people--even women!--can't do both of these things. Really, people want different things at different stages of life. Once you get beyond crackpot assumptions about female sexuality being some sort of scarce resource that must be dispensed only with the greatest gravity, it's really not hard to understand this.

...UPDATE: Based on comments, I think it's worth repeating Stepp's metaphor: "Your body is your property. . . . Think about the first home you hope to own. You wouldn't want someone to throw a rock through the front window, would you?" In other words, she's not talking about individual cases of women being pressured into sex (and, as Lesley says in comments, it's not as if shaming women somehow causes this pressure to vanish, and as zuzu says it's not as if they're aren't countervailing pressures), but she's making an a priori assumption that casual sex is something men want, women are the gatekeepers of, and are inherently damaging themselves by consenting to. I'm sorry, but no productive discussion is going to proceed from these assumptions.

All the Same

I found this article fascinating:

Britain and Ireland are so thoroughly divided in their histories that there is no single word to refer to the inhabitants of both islands. Historians teach that they are mostly descended from different peoples: the Irish from the Celts, and the English from the Anglo-Saxons who invaded from northern Europe and drove the Celts to the country’s western and northern fringes.

But geneticists who have tested DNA throughout the British Isles are edging toward a different conclusion. Many are struck by the overall genetic similarities, leading some to claim that both Britain and Ireland have been inhabited for thousands of years by a single people that have remained in the majority, with only minor additions from later invaders like Celts, Romans, Angles , Saxons, Vikings and Normans.

[...]

In all, about three-quarters of the ancestors of today’s British and Irish populations arrived between 15,000 and 7,500 years ago, when rising sea levels finally divided Britain and Ireland from the Continent and from one another, Dr. Oppenheimer calculates in a new book, “The Origins of the British: A Genetic Detective Story” (Carroll & Graf, 2006).

As for subsequent invaders, Ireland received the fewest; the invaders’ DNA makes up about 12 percent of the Irish gene pool, Dr. Oppenheimer estimates, but it accounts for 20 percent of the gene pool in Wales, 30 percent in Scotland, and about one-third in eastern and southern England.

The Normans, for all the importance that historians typically accord them, made only the tiniest dent in the genetic heritage of the English people.

Go Medieval

A department at my university recently interviewed a job candidate who spent about 30 minutes at dinner one evening explaining how s/he and his/her partner spend their free time constructing medieval suits of armor. We also learned in due course that the candidate had been "asked to leave" his/her current university for reasons that weren't quite clear to us at the time -- though perhaps it had something to do with the fact that during an informal reception held at a colleague's house, this candidate appears to have stolen a bottle of Xanax from the medicine cabinet.

When the pilfered pharmaceuticals wear off, perhaps this person can soothe the bitter sting of rejection with a medieval recipe for bread pudding, available at Medieval Cookery, a site dedicated to . . . well, the obvious.

I'm not much for creative anachronism, but when spring break rolls around next week, I'm going to eat about a thousand stuffed eggs.

Buying Our Way Out of Our Bluff

Kingdaddy makes an interesting comparison:

If you look at Japan then, and the United States now, you might see some familiar faces. A determined faction of aggrieved nationalists, having gambled the nation’s fortunes on high-risk ventures (the invasion of China or Iraq), now see the expansion of the war as the only way out of the current deadlock. Rather than question the whole enterprise, or the way it is being fought—in other words, to accept criticism—these men would rather find a “solution” through the elimination of foreign support for their enemies (Chinese guerrillas or Iraqi insurgents).

These sorts of men go farther than history should allow if they are propelled by larger, transcendental concerns. In the 1930s and 1940s, many Japanese felt that their government, led by the divine person of the Emperor, should assert its role as a great power. Since 2001, a faction of unilateralists, supported by Christian fundamentalists who believe in a God-sanctioned mission for the United States, have used the 9/11 attacks as the starting point for an effort to re-shape the region of the world most troublesome for US power.

As the failures mount, the transcendental ingredients of this political brew immunize leaders from their own mistakes. Setbacks become a test of faith, not a rebuttal of the original strategy. Normal rules of conduct, such as the Geneva Conventions, become intolerable restraints. Internal dissent becomes a treasonous attack on national will. To hell with what the rest of the world thinks, as long as the government can continue the pattern of lies and apologies, for as long as it keeps foreign leaders stammering in frustration. The worse things get, the more faith has to outshine everything else—diplomacy, democracy, treaties, international law, even mundane tactical questions—for fear that Providence will turn its face away permanently.

Kingdaddy allows, of course, that the US in 2007 and Japan in 1941 are different in important ways, notably in that the US is a democracy and Japan wasn't. I would add that the US isn't in quite as deep a spot as Japan was in 1941, but the comparison still resonates. Indeed, I think that it illuminates one of the reasons that democracy matters during war.

Implicit in most wingnut critiques of the anti-war left (and the anti-war right) is that democracy is a handicap in war. Dissent weakens a country at war, so we are told, and therefore democracies are at a disadvantage compared to autocracies. International relations theorists (Stam and Reiter in particular) tell us that this isn't empirically true; democracies, on the whole, tend to choose their wars better and fight better when engaged. There are certainly some examples of military organizations in authoritarian states performing very well (the US Army never matched the performance of the Red Army and the Wehrmacht, for example) but democracies do very well at the political and strategic levels, and some democratic military organizations (IDF, US Navy) have proven quite formidable.

What Kingdaddy's example suggests is that democracies may be able to determine when and how to lose a war better than autocracies, as well. Democratic states have a built in system for re-assessing foreign commitments, while autocratic states don't. The leadership of an autocratic state depends for legitimacy on a certain sense of infallibility, while the leadership in a democratic state can simply be replaced. While I hesitate to draw any empirical conclusions, there's some anecdotal evidence in favor of this hypothesis. The United States lost a war in Vietnam, but suffered no noticeable lasting detrimental effects outside of a certain inferiority complex. France lost a war in Indochina in 1954, and suffered a near democratic breakdown while losing another in Algeria in 1959, but managed to avoid regime collapse. Israel has lost two wars in Lebanon in the last eight years. On the other hand, we have the Japan example, in which the leadership clique simply couldn't escape a self-reinforcing cycle of disaster. Similarly, the Soviet Union drove itself straight into the ground in Afghanistan because it couldn't successfully disengage.

In other words, democracy isn't just an incidental difference between the US in 2007 and Japan in 1941, it's the critical difference. Any thoughts?

Reader Feedback: Alito and Abortion Edition

Commenter (and blogger) Bean raises some interesting points with respect to this post. I'll respond to each point separately:

First, while I agree that the current iteration of abortion law is important because it can ensure that poor women have access to abortion, it hasn't done that. Because of the Hyde Amendment, many poor women do not have access to this important right. Further, there are abortion providers in only 13% of U.S. counties and it is often poor women who cannot take 1 or 2 days off from work to procure the abortion they desire (sometimes more in states with waiting periods). They can't afford the time off and can't afford childcare for the children they already have. So while I agree with you on the meta point, I think it's at best a half-empty promise right now.

It is certainly true that, particularly in light of Harris v. McRae (which upheld the Hyde Amendment), the regime created by Roe has been suboptimal in terms of creating abortion access. It is also true that virtually all of the regulations upheld under Casey affect poor women more than rich women (which is one reason that a loosely interpreted "undue burden" standard could be used to effectively used to deny access to abortion. On the other hand, despite all this, Roe really has made a difference in abortion access for poor women compared to 1973. Private clinics can 1)advertise and 2)offer sliding scales, and this does provide significant (although far, far from ideal) access to poor women that they wouldn't have without the "negative" right. The crucial question is the whether the Court will do something to stop states from harassing and shutting down abortion clinics. In its current form, obviously it won't, so a lot depends on getting as few bad laws (and precedents) as possible in the meantime.

Another thing to add is that the problem geographic disparities in access is, on some level, one that law is limited in its capacity to solve (although it would be nice if it didn't make things worse.) And I should also take this opportunity to recommend Melody Rose's book.

Second, I'm not nearly as optimistic as you are about Alito. I think you may be right about Roberts, but given Alito's previous abortion jurisprudence, I am not so sure he would vote to uphold Casey. I don't think he's as conservative (little c) as one might hope. Maybe you have some more insight into his stance that I am missing and that you can share? Either way, Roberts has talked a big game about this so it would be interesting as a test for him.

I've discussed my views about what Alito is likely to do here and here (as well as in discussions of his nomination passim.) I agree with Bean that Alito would, if it came to that, provide a fifth vote to overturn Roe and Casey, although I doubt he would author an opinion urging it as Scalia has done. He will certainly vote to uphold every abortion regulation that comes to the Court. Perhaps more importantly, I don't think simply stripping all protections from the "undue burden" standard is an optimistic scenario -- quite the opposite. If the Court is going to stop protecting reproductive freedom it would be better if it is done openly, preferably with Scalia writing the lead opinion denouncing the Court for having previously signed on to the "baby-killing agenda." That Roberts--like Rehnquist--may be savvy enough to understand this is my fear, not my hope.

Then We Will Fight in the Shade of Mom's Basement

Shorter Victor Davis Hanson:

I welcome the triumphant return of comic book standards of right and wrong in this degenerate age, a time when irritating postmodernist spoilsports constantly insist that moral questions might have complex answers.

He's talking about the film 300, based on the Frank Miller graphic novel, which is of course the original source for the famous Herodotus version of Thermopylai. Though he begins by noting that "the movie has nothing to do with Iraq or contemporary events, at least in the direct sense," VDH can't resist ending with this gem:

Ultimately the film takes a moral stance, Herodotean in nature: there is a difference, an unapologetic difference between free citizens who fight for eleutheria and imperial subjects who give obeisance. We are not left with the usual postmodern quandary 'who are the good guys' in a battle in which the lust for violence plagues both sides. In the end, the defending Spartans are better, not perfect, just better than the invading Persians, and that proves good enough in the end. And to suggest that ambiguously these days has perhaps become a revolutionary thing in itself.

If you want to preen yourself on being a vessel of Manly Fortitude because you can compare your virtuousness favorably with that of terrorists, and if you're thrilled that you can find a rooting interest sufficient to justify getting off on a film where buff naked manly men chop each others' rippling pecs into salsa, you know, Rock On!

But that hardly makes for "revolutionary" politics or even aesthetics. That's pro wrestling fandom. Which I don't have a problem with, really, unless those prone to such fantasies somehow come to think that they have developed Profound Insights into how real wars with real weapons and real blood actually work. Then, we just may have issues...

(I think VDH meant "unambiguously" in the last sentence of that quote, BTW, or else his point about "postmodernism" makes even less sense.)

(Posted also at Whiskey Fire)

Jean Baudrillard, 1929-2007

Jean Baudrillard did not happen.

The McCain Paradox

Yglesias notes that Maverick McStraightTalk "has the misfortune of being both the most conservative candidate in the race and the one most hated by conservatives." It's quite strange, and is one of the ways in wish the Bush personality cult will hurt the GOP going forward. It seems to me that Ramesh Ponnuru is being completely rational. For someone who cares about policy rather than sticking it to liberals, has strong cultural conservative commitments (especially on abortion, where whatever his bizarre liberal glee club would prefer to think McCain's pro-criminalization record is as staunch as can be), and for whom fiscal conservatism is about something other than upper-class tax cuts (that will be temporary because of huge deficits), McCain is a perfectly respectable conservative, and certainly infinitely preferable to Giuliani or Romney. But he fought with Bush and made occasional gestures against Republican orthodoxy during the aftermath of the '00 primaries, so he has no chance this year.

Another interesting thing about the electoral dynamic Matthew describes is that if Rudy or Romney get the nomination a good Democratic candidate should be able to make overturning Roe--the least popular "cultural" issue the Republicans have--an albatross around the neck of the Republican candidate in the general election. Someone like Bush who was trusted by cultural reactionaries could get away with babbling about "a culture of life" and Taney Court decisions they probably don't understand. But any of the big 3 will have to keep saying how much they hate Roe, which means that unless the Democrat is inept that should be another issue fought on friendly Democratic terrain in '08.

The Woo, and the Hoo

Libby convicted on 4 of 5 counts.

After Roe?

Jessie Hill has an interesting three-part series about potentially overturning Roe at PrawfsBlawg. [HT: Volokh Conspiracy.] The long version of what I have to say on the issue can be found in my article last summer in TAP here and my reply to Benjamin Wittes-type "letting Roe go will be good for reproductive freedom" arguments here. To give the short version:

• The starting point for any discussion for the consequences of changing abortion law, I think, has to be the law on the ground, not the law in the books. The pre-Roe status quo ante was not that no women could get abortions, but because of arbitrary enforcement patterns affluent women had access to safe abortions and other women did not. What is at stake in abortion rights is whether poor women will have access to safe abortions.
  
• I think Hill is correct that Roe is safe for now--there are still 5 votes on the record for affirming it. Even if Republicans get another appointment to replace Stevens or Ginsburg, my guess is that Alito and (especially) Roberts would prefer not to formally overturn Roe, at least right away, but would rather simply empty Casey's "undue burden" standard of any content. However, in some ways this is the wrong question to ask, since for advocates of reproductive freedom this is the worst of all worlds--it would be much better if Roe were directly overturned than if states were allowed to create the pre-Roe status quo ante through the back door. Keeping Roe as (to use Rehnquist's phrase against his approach) a Potemkin precedent while removing any bite the "undue burden" standard has gets most of the policy benefit while denying the Democratic Party the political benefits of overruling Roe.
  
• The question of what would happen to laws still on the books is an interesting one. I can't believe that there would be any problems at all if there was a trigger passed by the legislature, and it's also hard to believe that a Court that would overturn Roe would prevent states from enforcing laws on the books (particularly since getting into questions of application would raise many difficult questions for advocates of criminalized abortion.)
  It's also important not to focus too much on the precise wording of statutes or exactly how exceptions are worded; these distinctions have very little effect in practice. Whether the statute is an outright ban or delegates the decision to panels of doctors, the effect tends to be abortion-on-demand for well-connected affluent women and severely restricted access for women who aren't either way.
  

[Cross-posted at TAPPED.]

Great Moments in Dolchstoss

Ayn Rand, high priestess of tedium, speaking to the the graduating class of cadets at West Point, 6 March 1974:

Something called "the military-industrial complex"--which is a myth or worse--is being blamed for all of this country's troubles. Bloody college hoodlums scream demands that R.O.T.C. units be banned from college campuses. Our defense budget is being attacked, denounced and undercut by people who claim that financial priority should be given to ecological rose gardens and to classes in esthetic self-expression for the residents of the slums.

Some of you may be bewildered by this campaign and may be wondering, in good faith, what errors you committed to bring it about. If so, it is urgently important for you to understand the nature of the enemy. You are attacked, not for any errors or flaws, but for your virtues. You are denounced, not for any weaknesses, but for your strength and your competence. You are penalized for being the protectors of the United States. On a lower level of the same issue, a similar kind of campaign is conducted against the police force. Those who seek to destroy this country, seek to disarm it--intellectually and physically. But it is not a mere political issue; politics is not the cause, but the last consequence of philosophical ideas. It is not a communist conspiracy, though some communists may be involved--as maggots cashing in on a disaster they had no power to originate. The motive of the destroyers is not love for communism, but hatred for America. Why hatred? Because America is the living refutation of a Kantian universe.

Today's mawkish concern with and compassion for the feeble, the flawed, the suffering, the guilty, is a cover for the profoundly Kantian hatred of the innocent, the strong, the able, the successful, the virtuous, the confident, the happy. A philosophy out to destroy man's mind is necessarily a philosophy of hatred for man, for man's life, and for every human value. Hatred of the good for being the good, is the hallmark of the twentieth century. This is the enemy you are facing.

Eight years to the day after delivering this speech, Ayn Rand went toe-up.

General Managers

It's pretty obvious that the Forbes list of best general managers in sports is seriously flawed; the first entry from Major League Baseball is Billy Beane at 26. Either baseball GMs are an incredibly inept lot compared to their brethren in football, basketball, and hockey, or the methodology is flawed. The error seems to be the focus on winning percentage (indeed, winning percentage was double weighted). Since there's a narrower range of winning percentages in baseball than in any of the other sports, baseball GMs get excluded from the top (and the bottom, presumably). It seems like this would have been a simple problem to note and correct for...

Via Yglesias.

...UPDATE (SL): I can't judge McHale, although if I understand correctly all NBA fans think he's awful, but allow me to say that any list that ranks Doug "Let's trade Doug Gilmour and Jamie Macoun for 5 guys who aren't nearly as good as Jamie Macoun" Risebrough over Darryl "Miikka Kiprusoff for a draft pick, Kristian Huselius for a 6th defenseman, etc." Sutter has to be the worst. methodology. ever. Did John Lott design this thing? Although at least Peter Bavasi didn't make the list.

F-35B Liftoff

One of the most promising elements of the F-35 (Joint Strike Fighter) is the capability that one variant will have for V/STOL, or vertical/short take off and landing. The gap in capability between conventional carrier aircraft and land based fighters closed a long time ago. However, fixed wing aircraft (aircraft that take off from runway of normal length, or that need to use catapults in order to lift off from aircraft carriers) still have a substantial advantage over even the most advanced V/STOL craft. They're faster, they use less fuel, and they can carry heavier payloads. The F-35B variant is supposed to have V/STOL capability, and when (if?) it enters production it will immediately become the most effective V/STOL fighter in the world. The F-35B still gives up a lot in exchange for this capability, as the fuel requirements of a short launch are very high, and some payload will be lost, but the gap is nevertheless narrowing.

The Royal Navy and the USMC are the biggest backers of the F-35B. The Marine Corps has operated the Harrier for quite a while, and wants to keep its vertical capability. The Royal Navy wants to use the F-35B on its new CVF, the next generation of British aircraft carrier. The implications of the F-35B, however, extend beyond British and American use. Right now, only the United States and France are capable of extended carrier operations with modern, fixed wing aircraft. Russia has a large carrier (Admiral Kuznetsov) that operates Su-33 fixed wing aircraft, but pilot and crew training are so spotty that it's unlikely Kuznetsov could carry out operations in war conditions. Brazil operates Sao Paulo (the old French Foch), but only flies A-4 Skyhawks, a very old attack aircraft (John McCain was shot down in one). The F-35B and its foreign contemporaries have the potential to give states that can't operate carriers big enough to carry fixed wing aircraft (Italy, India, Spain, Thailand, and potentially a few others) the options of flying a modern, advanced, capable fighter aircraft. It's a development that has the potential to level the playing field a bit in naval aviation, both by itself and as part of a general trend towards the narrowing of the gap between fixed wing and V/STOL aircraft.

Of course, the F-35B may never be built in large numbers. The Royal Navy CVF program is in question, and the CVF frame is large enough to accomodate normal fixed wing aircraft. Indeed, France is investigating constructing a CVF to its own specifications that would operate such aircraft. Still, it's a program that merits some attention.

Cross-posted to Tapped.

Perhaps There Is Something Wrong with Your Herring...

Thanks to the LGM crew for the invitation to guest blog. It's a wonderful opportunity -- I get to make fun of Althouse as much as I want, secure in the knowledge that no matter what I say, she'll just blame Scott. Hot Dog!

Tonight, though, I've instead been ruminating on the rather convoluted way in which Movement Conservatives tend to consider questions relating to race. (Just to narrow this down, by "movement conservatives" I mean, well, people who actively participate in the conservative movement, by writing or buying Regnery books, going to CPAC conventions, writing or commenting on right-wing blogs, and so forth -- I don't mean someone who just tends to vote Republican, or even, say, John McCain, who is quite far to the right on every imaginable issue, but for any number of reasons simply isn't considered one of the gang.)

Take this extraordinary post on Red State, for instance, where we learn that Barack Obama is, well, guilty of racism.

No, really. The argument is crazy, but fascinating:

Mr. Obama himself - he of the "don't call him articulate because you marginalize his race" defense - has stepped into just that situation, and I think that this question is a very valid one to ask: if the African American community is, as I believe, and as Obama and his defenders have claimed to believe, as normal, articulate, intelligent, etc. as anybody else (to the point that, as we have been fighting for years to achieve, race should no longer matter or be noticed), then why does the fact that he is speaking to an overwhelmingly southern black audience mean that he has to change his manner of speech altogether, from his usual measured, clear, enunciated oratory to THIS

The "THIS" goes to a YouTube video of Obama addressing the Selma Jubilee. We'll watch it in a moment, but let's be clear about the accusation Red State poster Jeff Emanuel is leveling against Obama. He's saying he's a racist -- perhaps an unwitting racist, but a racist all the same:

If I were to radically alter my enunciation specifically for a talk to an audience composed of a certain race, well, there's no question what message that would send about my opinion of that race's intelligence and importance - and it wouldn't be a good one.

The question is, will anybody notice the message that Obama is sending regarding his opinion of his own race in the video above - and will anybody allow themselves to really think about what that message means?

What's interesting here is that the Red State poster is not at all challenging Obama for claiming a particular racial and historical identity, a line of attack one might suppose someone interested in a thoroughgoing critique of identity politics might utilize. (Obama's speech, as we'll see, is a retelling of his family history in the context of the American civil rights movement in the South, in which his family did not directly participate.) No; the substance of the speech is not addressed at all, merely its manner of delivery, which, we're led to believe, is some sort of horrible cakewalking minstrel show nightmare.

Got that? OK, now watch it:



I have to say, I don't see the pandering. I also don't see how Obama's delivery here is radically different from his delivery at the 2004 Democratic convention, his best known appearance so far:



Hell, Obama's speech at Selma is more grammatical than the one he gave in 2004: no sentence fragments (that I caught, anyway).

But the real issue here is not the necessarily subjective comparison of the speeches. I don't hear any radical differences, but that's just me, some guy on the Internets.

No. The real issue here is the subjective reception of the speech on the part of the people to whom it was directly addressed.

Let me go out on a limb here and suggest that veterans of the Civil Rights struggle in the American South are actually pretty good at figuring out when someone is talking to them in a condescending fashion. I'll even go nuts and suggest that every person you see on the dais behind Obama in that Selma video has likely heard literally thousands of speeches on this general topic, and has by now a pretty good idea of what's well said and what's baloney. And call me crazy, but I don't think it's up to me and my pale ass, nor up to Red State and its tutti-frutti behind, nor to my Aunt Barney the Purple Dinosaur, or whoever, to make the call as to what's derogatory and what isn't to that audience.

I saw them applauding. Maybe some of them didn't like it. I don't know -- but neither does anyone at Red State either. And that's the rub.

I don't think this Red State poster specifically, nor movement conservatives generally, appreciate a very fundamental point. Most people are far less bothered by what you say about them than they are royally pissed off when you try to speak for them. That's what really makes people nuts, and rightly so.

I am myself critical of identity politics, in many ways. But I don't see how modern movement conservatism has in any way contributed positively to a mature discussion of race in 21st century America. They're all about the point scoring. Too bad they don't seem to actually understand the game. Or the reality.

Wankery

In the midst of a defense of the "Wanker of the Day" feature, Ezra makes such a nice summary of the problem:

The feature actually has a substantive point. Among other things, the lefty blogosphere was founded on a critique of the mainstream media that argued, contrary to popular belief, that the media was not actually liberal. The individuals who comprised it may have been tolerant on cultural issues, but years of sustained attacks from the right had cowed reporters into a hollow set of "objective" protocols that served to obscure truth rather than enhance it. Simultaneously, decades of sustained attacks on liberals had spurred "serious pundits" to underscore their independence by routinely attacking the left. The result was a media which may have voted Democratic, but was fairly hostile to progressivism.

Well said.

Ineptitude by Design

Eric Martin has a fantastic post on Walter Reed and the Bush administration:

The fiscal policy has centered around the goal of redistributing money to the wealthiest Americans through a series of multi-trillion dollar tax cuts, and it has been wildly successful. Credit where due. There have been some unfortunate side effects necessitated by this massive diversion of resources, such as underfunding the VA/military hospital system, but this was anticipated and not the result of "incompetence." Similarly, we should recognize that the widespread problems with this health care system won't go away without a restructuring of fiscal priorities. Holding a certain number of military officials accountable, and working to streamline the bureacratic processes that are contributing to some of the problems, are worthwhile goals but not nearly sufficient to rectify the situation.

Shrill. Oh, so shrill.

Coincidence? I think not.

I offer the following in the spirit of non-partisan sobriety, acknowledging the Great and Awesome Blessings that the sustained life of our Glorious and Respected Comrade Leader bestows upon us all.

Lest anyone doubt the reason for Richard Bruce Cheney's deliverance from peril into the waiting arms of March, unto you I say behold!

Exhibit A:

March is DVT Awareness Month. DVT Awareness Month is being sponsored by the Coalition to Prevent DVT to raise awareness of this serious medical condition among consumers, healthcare professionals, government, and public health leaders.

Exhibit B:

US Vice-President Dick Cheney has a blood clot in his leg and is being treated with blood-thinning medication, his office has said. . . .

Mr. Cheney recently returned to Washington after long flights to Japan, Australia, Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Blood clots - or deep vein thrombosis (DVT) - can be associated with long-distance flying because it leads to inactivity and dehydration.

In addition to mustering us all quietly to war against Iran, our Beloved and Beneficent Vice President has now drawn our attention -- as the month of March requires -- to an affliction that will strike over two million Americans this year and will kill around 200,000. Until today, roughly three quarters of our countrymen had little or no awareness of the severe threat posed to our nation's existence by DVT.

Thanks to Dick Cheney, even the Islamofascists are now better informed about this silent killer. Thanks, Mr. Vice President. Keep on truckin'.

Guest Bloggers!

Since two members of the L, G & M consortium will be in Las Vegas for the Western Political Science Association conference, this week we are pleased to announce (as you can see below) that the estimable LizardBreath of Unfogged will be making a return appearance. In addition, Thers of Whiskey Fire (and some more obscure outlets) will be favoring us with the highest levels of civiliosity. Welcome them both!

Scary Gossip

Tara McKelvey at Tapped is hearing military gossip that soldiers have been told to expect being sent to Iran:

Soldiers in three separate units in Fort Stewart have been saying they are now being informed that they will soon be deployed for 12 to 18 months -- and they should plan on going to Iran. At least that's what I heard from an army wife in Hinesville. I didn't really believe her.

Still, I mentioned it at a recent NYU Law School symposium, "The Mirage of the State: Fragmentation, Fragility, and Failure and the Implications on Law and Security." (We just called it the "Failed States" event.) A woman sitting next to me said she had heard the same thing from a lieutenant colonel she knows. "He has been told that they are going to Iran," she recalled.

I haven't heard anyone seriously argue that attacking Iran would be a good idea. I've seen plenty of people argue that it would be an absolutely terrible idea. Gossip like this, which gives the impression that we're inevitably sliding toward war despite the fact that there's no sane justification for it, frightens me unspeakably.
There may be nothing at all to this; and I may be worried about nothing. But worrying about nothing is harmless -- letting a gradual movement toward another insane war go forward without comment is a terrifying idea. (also at my home blog Unfogged.)

"When You Read Dowd, You're Riding With Coulter."

Somerby notes that Maureen Dowd that when it comes to obsessing about allegedly feminine Democrats, is essentially Coulter without the outright slurs:

But then, why should pundits criticize Coulter when she describes Dem males as big “f*ggots?” It’s very similar to the gender-based “analysis” their dauphine, the Comptesse Maureen Dowd, has long offered. In Dowd’s work, John Edwards is routinely “the Breck Girl”(five times so far—and counting), and Gore is “so feminized that he’s practically lactating.” Indeed, two days before we voted in November 2000, Dowd devoted her entire column, for the sixth time, to an imaginary conversation between Gore and his bald spot. “I feel pretty,” her headline said (pretending to quote Gore’s inner thoughts).That was the image this idiot wanted you carrying off to the voting booth with you! Such is the state of Maureen Dowd’s broken soul. And such is the state of her cohort.

And now, in the spirit of fair play and brotherhood, she is extending this type of “analysis” to Barack Obama. In the past few weeks, she has described Obama as “legally blonde” (in her headline); as “Scarlett O’Hara” (in her next column); as a “Dreamboy,” as “Obambi,” and now, in her latest absurd piece, as a “schoolboy” (text below). Do you get the feeling that Dowd may have a few race-and-gender issues floating around in her inane, tortured mind? But this sort of thing is nothing new for the comptesse. Indeed, such imagery almost defines the work of this loathsome, inane Antoinette.

Quite right. Dowd reminds me of Glenn Reynolds engaging with Andrew Sullivan:

The Ole Perfesser calls Andrew Sullivan an "excitable" "emoter-in-chief" who should write "a bit less about gay marriage." To his credit, the Perfesser did not just up and call him a faggot, but when you have such command of schoolyard code, you don't have to get crude.

And the difference between Dowd and Coulter, of course, is that the former is much more damaging to both Democrats and the nation's political discourse.

. . . and to think such talent was wasted on Thighmaster . . .

I'm actually surprised that Suzanne Somers' 1980 collection of poems, Touch Me, only ranks third on Bookfinder's list of the most sought-after out-of-print books. Here's a sample, courtesy of a fan:

Touch me --- in secret places no one has reached before,
--- in silent places where words only interfere,
--- in sad places where only whispering makes sense.

Touch me --- in the morning when night still clings,
--- at midday when confusion crowds upon me,
--- at twilight as I begin again to know who I am,
--- in the evening when I see you and I hear you best of all.

Now, this certainly can't compare with Lynne Cheney's masterwork of lesibian-frontier erotica, Sisters -- which made the list at #2 in 2005 -- but at least we can still get Cheney's book as a .pdf document here. For the life of me, I'll never understand why Jewel's A Night Without Armor is still in print, while Somers' verse languishes in obscurity.

I've said it before, and I suppose I'll say it again -- we live in a cultural wasteland.

A Movie So Crass, And Awkwardly Cast, Even I Could Be the Star

Wow, late winter is just a bad time for movies. You'd think this would be the most execrable:

This teen comedy centers on a high schooler who gets more than he bargained for after his constant lying leads to popularity.

That God somebody finally filmed that plot idea--what took them so long? Maybe they'll cast a prominent model with slightly-larger-than-fashionable glasses as the ugly girl who's Really Right For Him In the End too.

And yet, it's not even close to the worst-looking studio movie released in the last few weeks. The auteur of National Lampoon's Van Wilder directing a--well, I can't call it a "comedy"--about middle-aged bikers staring Tim Allen? At least it produced Tony Scott's review. ("The main thing about these guys — the main source of the movie’s fumbling attempts at humor — is that they’re not gay. Really. Seriously. No way. They may worry about people thinking that they’re gay, and they may do things that might make people think that they’re gay — dance, touch one another, take off their clothes, express emotion — but they’re absolutely 100 percent not gay. No no no no no no. No sir, I mean, no ma’am. That’s what makes it funny, see.")

OK, that's getting close to the frozen limit of unwatchability. But hold on...coming down the stretch there's some vaguely Da Vinci Codeish and very pretentious-looking thriller. Starring Jim Carrey. And directed by Joel Schumacher. We have a winner!

Oh, and I think it's obvious that democracy can never work.

Alex P. Keaton

David Haglund has a really nice article at Slate reviewing the release of a Family Ties DVD set. On the cultural import of Alex P. Keaton:

Still, it's tempting to conclude that Keaton's near-iconic status requires more explanation. Last summer in the New Republic, Rick Perlstein, the left-leaning author of a book on Barry Goldwater, argued that, even now, after years of Republican rule, the "culture of conservatives still insists that it is being hemmed in on every side." Having been "shaped in another era [the mid-1960s], one in which conservatives felt marginal and beleaguered," conservative culture—Perlstein had in mind everything from "Goldwater kitsch" to Fox News—still feeds on this antagonism, reflecting a sense that righteousness is always at odds with the decadent mainstream.

Alex P. Keaton fits this vision perfectly. Throughout the show's run, he was on his own: His parents were liberal, his sister was a ditz, and his one conservative ally, Uncle Ned, was a fugitive and then a drunk. Still, he persevered. If those 2006 midterms in which Fox memorably intervened were the harbinger of a major Democratic resurgence, then these long-delayed DVDs might be arriving at just the right time.

Right. Keaton was, no doubt, a hero for me in late 1980s, back when I fancied myself a young conservative. His most compelling quality was that he never "came around"; in spite of whatever the show threw at him (Uncle Ned, for example), he remained a chirpy, enthusiastic conservative.

I also quite love the episode in which he receives his first grade at college; "Anef". Having spent years dealing with college freshmen who always got As in high school, then find themselves staring in befuddlement at a C-, I've often wanted to play that clip in class. Sadly, we're reaching the point where none of them will have the faintest idea who Alex P. Keaton was.

...in comments, bloix makes a befuddling statement of his own, in reference to my claim that students who receive As in high school often receive Cs in college:

As the father of teenagers who will be attending college soon, I can tell you that I have nightmares about people like you:
insecure, untrained, uninterested teaching assistants who boost their own egos by cutting down those of their students.

Look, asshole, the first rule of any person in authority is to make clear what is expected of those under your authority. If you had years of students who were befuddled by your grading policy, then you spent years doing a shitty job of conveying your expectations.

Christ, I can hear the condescension in your voice as you sneer at those stupid 18-year olds confronted by the absolute power of you, the grand old man of 28.

I'm thirty-two, but whatever. As I respond in my own comment, the average high school GPA for an incoming freshman at UW is about 3.7, while the freshman average GPA is about 2.7, if I recall correctly. What this means is that new students, in their first year, will receive grades far lower than they are accustomed to. This is so commonsensical that one could hardly imagine the necessity of pointing it out. Moreover, those who have experience with college freshmen understand that this divergence between results and expectations is a very real challenge of early college instruction... thus the comment above about the pedagogical usefulness of the particular Family Ties episode.

How Dare You Show My The Effects of My Policies!

I've been looking forward to this since Friday: "Something I didn't photograph, but wished I did: Nation magazine writer Max Blumenthal queued up to get a book signed by Michelle Malkin. When he reached her, however, he didn't produce a book. He produced this photo and asked her to sign it. According to Blumenthal, Malkin got so angry she left the table; video that can prove or disprove this telling should be posted on Monday." And, sure enough, the video's here. For some reason, Malkin is almost as ashamed as pictures of the race-based concentration camps she wrote an entire book defending as some Young Republicans are of their Confederate flag lapels ("What's wrong with the Confederacy?"). There are many more classic comments within; I particularly enjoyed David Horowitz--David Horowitz!--claim that The Left is driven by "anger and resentment." Great work by Blumenthal.

Hello Kitty. In the unlikely event of a water landing, your seat cushion may be used as a floatation device. Or a scratching post. Whatever.

I'm not sure if Dan Nexon has heard the news yet, but apparently EVA Air has been operating a Hello Kitty Airline for a while now.

I suppose this is a thousand times less obnoxious than the defunct Hooters Air, but I still just don't understand capitalism sometimes.

(via Grow-a-Brain)

Eagleton

Thomas Eagleton, 1929-2007.

He would have made rather a better vice-president than Spiro Agnew, but that's damning with faint praise. Without doubt a fine legislator, he played no small part in the effort to restrain executive power after the Vietnam War.

As I'm just back from Chicago (ISA) there'll be no Deposed Monarch Blogging this week.

A Man Stares Into The Abyss

It must be said that I, too, saw The Left yesterday--it was truly chilling. I can assure you that even when he was right it was motivated by 100% pure America hatred and expressed in a manner shockingly lacking in civiliosity and integritude.

I would mention my enjoyable meeting with Intertubes Dark Lord and rank Leprechaun Extremist D*ncan Bl*ck, but I fear the mere invocation of his name may bring Josh Trevino to our comments section, and we're running a family website here.

..They've gotten Matt too. Bastards! I always knew The Left was objectively pro-Michael Bay.

And the original Amos and Andy offered a brilliant critique of whiteness!

Project Runway is mildly upset today that no one else appreciates the deconstructive, feminist comic genius of Andrew "Dice" Clay. Having taken my past critics somewhat to heart on the ethics of driving up Althouse's site traffic, I'm not going to link to her -- but here she is, quoting herself on what she evidently wrote about the Diceman last year:

The first time I saw Andrew Dice Clay, I took him to be a brilliant critic of masculinity. Then everybody just got mad at him and made him go away.

And ever since, the world has been punished immensely for this senseless cultural assault. Had Clay not been wrongly dismissed as a talentless, monotonous hack -- instead of the billiant satirist of manly foibles, cleverly disguised as cheap jokes about analingus and yeast infections -- his career might not have been unfustly cut short by Ford Fairlane. Now he's trying to make a comeback, Althouse tells us, but it appears the world is still unprepared for these comic stylings:

Andrew Dice Clay: Jack and Jill went up the hill, each with a buck and a quarter. Jill came down with two-fifty, OOOOOOOOOOOOH!
Audience: WHAT A FUCKING WHORE!

Indeed. You see, this simple, ribald parable articulates a stern rebuke of the cash nexus that continues to overdetermine heteronormative masculinity. Moreover, coupled with Judith Butler's masterwork Gender Trouble -- which also appeared in 1989 -- The Diceman Cometh represents a high-water mark in the critique of the ontology of gender. Duh!

Next week: Althouse wonders why Howard the Duck didn't get a wider hearing.

...UPDATE (BY SL), so if I understand the "feminism" being propounded by Althouse correctly, it entails the following premises:

• Andrew Dice Clay: feminist.
• Supporting Sam Alito for the Supreme Court and claiming he's a moderate: feminist.
• Attending a meeting with a Bill Clinton while not taping down your breasts: an appalling betrayal of feminism.

How influential this is going to be is unclear.

You May Be A Complacent Fake-Liberal If...

There's not much to say about this; I agree that it "comes across like something written by a teenage D-List "Youstabee" during the peak glory of the Summer of War." Particularly instructive is--especially with respect to foreign policy--how much of what defines an "extremist" is based on virtually unfalsifiable attributions of motivations rather than on specific policy preferences (you know the routine--"OK, you were right about the Iraq War, but you're saying that because you hate America, so it doesn't count!"), as well as the inevitable dismissal or arguments made in an insufficiently "civil" manner--these are the favored strategies for those would would prefer not to engage with substantive criticism on the merits. And to the extent that there is specific content, the people it applies to have virtually no influence in American politics, which makes arguing against them not terribly productive. To get something constructive out of this, perhaps we can create a more specific typology: the characteristics you're likely to have if you're the kind of respectable pundit who can be the token "liberal" at prominent national publications and Sunday talk shows:

• During the run-up to an exceptionally disastrous war when prescient anti-war voices are scarcer in the mainstream media than people of color at a Nader rally, you can never get around to using your prominent media outlets to clearly disagree with the war, you do find time to suggest that you agree with the war, and yet years after the fact when the war is both an abject disaster and highly unpopular you suddenly start patting yourself on the back for having courageously opposed the war all along.
  
• Even as you nominally opposed the war after it became easy to do so, you can somehow never find anybody else who opposes it in the right way--"it's easy to assume that they are rooting for an American failure," you claim, never naming any names or giving any quotes--and maintain that another Freidman is somehow always required for people to be Serious.
• You claim that people who oppose the Bush administration's illegal warrantless wiretapping program are as "out of the mainstream" as people who think that Terri Schiavo was three days away from walking out of the hospital, despite easily available public opinion data that shows the opposite.
  
• You make the transparently illogical assertion that the increasing insecurity of the contemporary job market makes the privitization of Social Security more desirable. (I guess this kind of reactionary and unpopular position isn't outside the mainstream--and certainly not comparable to the Schiavo wingnuts--but is "speaking truth to power" or something.)
• You claim, based on inferences gleaned from George Bush's alleged "authenticity," that the result of Bush's election would be "'a quiet, patient, and persistent bipartisanship,' with no big tax cuts or Supreme Court ideologues" and suggest that "Bush could easily retain Lawrence Summers at Treasury and Richard Holbrooke at the United Nations."
  
• You dismiss fundamental economic issues that might matter to people not in your highly elevated income bracket as "jobs, health-care, and blah-blah-blah."
  

Nobody could hit every one of these, could they?

...Ezra: " Who is Joe Klein arguing against here? Even a left-wing strawman would find this recitation of his positions a smidge reductive. And to say that "it would be wildly stupid for me to get into a pissing match by naming names" is basically irresponsible. Either Joe Klein is arguing against real human beings with a role in the national dialogue or he is not, but until he names some names, the context of the conversation suggests he's talking about the left wing blogosphere -- he's simply retaining plausible deniability around his insinuation."

Reading Comprehension 101

I've asked this before, but do certain A-List wingnuts actually take the time to read on articles to which they link, or do they just find endorsement for the views they already--

OK, this is shaping up to be another installment of "Simple Answers to Simple Questions." That being said, here's the article that gave Rubble Boy his morning wood. An astronomer by the name of Habibullo Abdussamatov, who heads the St. Petersburg's Pulkovo Astronomical Observatory, believes -- contra the established consensus among actual climate scientists -- that the Sun bears most of the responsibility for climate change. And here's the critical section that Reynolds and others appear to have missed:

"His views are completely at odds with the mainstream scientific opinion," said Colin Wilson, a planetary physicist at England's Oxford University.

"And they contradict the extensive evidence presented in the most recent IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] report."

Amato Evan, a climate scientist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, added that "the idea just isn't supported by the theory or by the observations."

. . . Perhaps the biggest stumbling block in Abdussamatov's theory is his dismissal of the greenhouse effect, in which atmospheric gases such as carbon dioxide help keep heat trapped near the planet's surface.

He claims that carbon dioxide has only a small influence on Earth's climate and virtually no influence on Mars.

But "without the greenhouse effect there would be very little, if any, life on Earth, since our planet would pretty much be a big ball of ice," said Evan, of the University of Wisconsin.

So National Geographic found someone willing to make grand, contrarian pronouncements on a subject outside his actual field of research. Moreover, they found a number of sources who, by using simple tool like, say, science, were able to point out how full of shit he is. And Reynolds -- applying the rule that only contrariantism counts as non-partisan -- links to it in his typically breezy way, releasing an Army of Davids upon the world like a plague of toads.

. . .Media Matters has more . .

Master Class

This probably should be djw's job as his biggest fan on this weblog, but Jackmormon notes that there will be a major Abbas Kiarostami retrospective at MoMA this month. However, while she points out that "NYU turned down his offer of a master-class," she leaves out the most important part of the story: happily, by turning down those West Village gangsters Kiarostami ended up at New York's finest institution of higher learning instead:

This March, Hunter College film and media students will have the rare opportunity to learn filmmaking under the mentorship of the acclaimed Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami, who will hold a nine day film production master class in the Department of Film & Media Studies. Mr. Kiarostami’s visit to Hunter is being underwritten by The Rifkind Foundation.

Kiarostami has developed and led master classes for film students around the world and Hunter College is the first college in the United States to host the filmmaker. His master class at Hunter College coincides with a retrospective of his films and photography at the Museum of Modern Art and P.S.1.

Cool!

Big Media Hoogland

I meant to link to this last week, but life intervened. Anyhow, my crazy (in a good way) Uncle John was recently profiled in the WaPo, where his life's work -- the study of prairie dog behavior -- was described in all its gruesome glory:

The world's expert on lust, violence and cannibalism among prairie dogs uses a slide in his lectures that sums up a lifetime of research. A pack of the squirrel-size creatures is shown perched on their hind legs: cute, cute, cute, cute, cute.

But then, next to each fuzzy head, John L. Hoogland has written something nasty he has seen happen in a prairie dog "town." "Promiscuity, kidnapping, pedophilia, murder, infanticide," it says. Not so cute.

"Studying prairie dogs is like watching little people," he says. "Whatever we do, they do as well, and usually more often."

John's work has pretty thoroughly undermined the claims of idiotic Western ranchers, who insist on waging a war of extermination against prairie dogs because the holes they burrow allegedly break cows' legs. John's never met a rancher who's actually experienced this with his cows -- it's always a friend of a friend, or some guy the rancher heard about in the adjacent county. As the Post article explains, prairie dogs keep their populations pretty stable, in part by periodically tearing each other limb from limb, and so they pose a substantially lesser threat to cattle than rabbits or other fecund critters that aren't quite so nasty to each other.

The whole thing is pretty interesting.

Feminism and Ex Ante Housework Standards

Matt interprets data adduced by Jessica and finds more evidence for my assertion that the typical arrangement of housework in households occupied by heterosexual couples reflects unjust gender balances combined with actually different ex ante standards of cleanliness/tidiness (which are related to said equalities, of course, but a feminist analysis doesn't require any specific ex ante level of domestic work beyond what is necessary for sanitation, cooking, childrearing, etc.) With all due respect to the great Marcotte and Waring I continue to disagree with the implied solution of creating equality within domestic work norms that are an unholy marriage of 1)patriarchy, 2)the related assumption of one partner devoted full-time to domestic work, and 3)general cultural assumptions that unstructured leisure time is somehow immoral, and instead think that it makes more sense to try to achieve equality within a more rational allocation of priorities that doesn't take 50s-bourgeois standards of tedious domestic busywork as a given. An additional advantage of my idea is that I think gender equality will be much more viable if the total work is reduced. To once again borrow from Jacob Levy the idea that "[t]he only non-sexist equilibrium is for both partners to converge on the preferences that got inculcated in women by societies that had one partner be a full-time housekeeper, sometimes with additional paid help" is plainly erroneous, and assuming such standards on average puts women in an exceptionally weak bargaining position in which gross inequalities are inevitable. The underlying differences don't justify the inequality, but I think they do make clear that trying to equalize at an anachronistically high level of domestic work is a bad feminist strategy.

Friday Cat Blogging... Starbuck and Nelson

Polls

Bill Kristol asks a bunch of stupid questions:

Enlighten us, Arianna. Poll your readers. Ask them: Are they pleased that the attempt against Vice President Cheney failed? Are they grateful that he is alive and well? Do you hope the U.S. prevails in Afghanistan? In Iraq?

OK, I'll bite. "Yes"; "Well, I don't wish him any specific harm"; "Didn't we, like, liberate them a long time ago?"; and "My cat's name is Mittens."

So now I have a stupid series of questions for Kristol. Was the bombing the other day merely another attempt to creat "the impression of chaos?" Does this show how "worried" the bad guys are? Is your cat named Mittens, too?

The Perfect Follow-up?

Lance on The Black Donnelys:

Note to Paul Haggis, Oscar winning director intent on ruining his reputation by producing a TV show so cliched and hackneyed it will make his Walker Texas Ranger days seem like a time of ferocious artistic integrity:

You are not excused for indulging in an ethnic stereotype just because you've acknowledged you're indulging in an ethnic stereotype.

Five minutes into the first episode of The Black Donnellys tonight the Donnelly brothers get into a fistfight. In a bar. During a wake.

But just before all hell breaks loose, the narrator, a character named Joey Ice Cream, who is supposedly telling the story from his jail cell to a couple of cops, says something like, "The Irish are often stereotyped as drunks who like to get into fights. This is so unfair it makes you so mad that sometimes you just got to get drunk and punch somebody."

I should have turned it off right then.

I didn't see it, so I can't judge its overall quality. But having characters justify the stalest cliches by pointing out the cliches? You can't get a better replacement for Studio 60 than that!

...Catherine Andrews and the rest of the flophouse think it's horrible, although unlike Lance think it's marginally better than Studio 60.

That Ain't No Good

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has retracted a 1992 acknowledgement that, before and during World War II, Japan enslaved women from all over Asia for sexual purposes. Celtic Dragon has an exhaustive discussion of the topic.

Abe has already been on thin ice with China and Korea because of his rightish foreign policy views and refusal to rule out visiting the Yasukuni Shrine. The Shrine, visited repreatedly be Abe's predecessor Junichiro Koizumi, contains the names of thirty class A war criminals from the imperial period. I expect that the South Koreans are going to freak over this, and with good cause.

The Captain Tries His Hand at Science Fiction

Ed Morrisey tries to put lipstick on a pig:

Context remains important here, which both Reed and the Times fail to consider. Intelligence is not an exact science, and conclusions have to be drawn on spotty evidence at times. The United States cannot allow itself the luxury of academic analysis paralysis; we have to prepare to meet danger before it becomes an unassailable fact, and that is especially true with nuclear proliferation.

Which is, really, no more than a typically wingnutty fetishization of the "decision" such that deciders get credit even when the decisions they make are obviously, stunningly, and disastrously wrong. More to the point:

No one disputes the fact that North Korea clandestinely bought 20 uranium centrifuges from Pakistan. That broke their part of the Agreed Framework, a violation that the US could not just ignore. After all, there are no other uses for uranium centrifuges than to enrich uranium, a process which the Kim regime supposedly had eschewed as part of the 1994 treaty. It seems a fairly reasonable conclusion that Kim didn't spend his hard currency on the centrifuges just to put them in a museum, but to enrich uranium.

When confronted on this, Kim refused to acknowledge it. That left the US a couple of choices. One, we could continue to operate our side of the agreement and supply them with oil while we attempted to get them to acknowledge that they were pursuing HEU. The other was to cut them off and force them back to the table.

This is simply wrong. Indeed, the central case that the United States made regarding the uranium enrichment program was that North Korea had acknowledged it, even if that acknowledgement may have depended on a mistranslation. More importantly, asserting that the cut off was intended to bring the North Koreans back to the table is just silly. Once the US stopped fuel shipments, it was obvious that a complete North Korean defection from the agreement was possible. Recall the context; the United States was committed to building a case for attacking Iraq, and there was no interest in Washington for making any serious military threats against Pyongyang before the Iraq issue was settled. The breaking of the seals at Yongbyon and the disruption of the verification equipment was an entirely predictable consequence of the US action.

Ed can pretend all he wants that the outside possibility that North Korea might, someday, be able to enrich uranium was a larger threat than their capability to use the plutonium at Yongbyon. He can also pretend that the breaking of the agreement had nothing to do with North Korea's ability to assemble and detonate a nuclear device last year. Finally, he can pretend that the new agreement is something other than the Agreed Framework under terms less favorable to the United States. I suppose that, in order to defend the North Korea policy of this administration, one must pretend to believe all kinds of things.

Working Blue

Oh, my!

Of course, this is my favorite (even though the search term in question is not technically on Carlin's list...)

L, G & M '08!

Huh, Unity '08 predicted that they'd have 5-20 million people participating in their pointless onanism "online primary"? Pikers! I would like to take the opportunity to announce the Lawyers, Guns and Money primary, which I predict will have 40, 50, maybe even a hundred million voters! Finally, we can heal this country's deep political wounds by coming together and admitting, in a nice, civil, nonpartisan way that I'm right about everything.

(Via MY.)

But At Least We Didn't Do What Clinton Did!

I assume that Rob may have more to say about this, but in the meantime allow me to point out that the Bush administration's foreign policy can be summed up in two words: "in" and "ept."

...Update by Rob; I have very little to add, other than this.

Age of Schlesinger

Arthur Schlesinger has moved on. Apart from a couple of minor cites from A Thousand Days for a paper I wrote a long time ago, the only Schlesinger I've read is Age of Jackson. That would have been autumn quarter 1993 at the University of Oregon, in a History of Jacksonian America class taught by "Mad" Jack Maddux. If I recall correctly, Erik Loomis was also in that class. Schlesinger spun an entertaining yarn in Age of Jackson, but it would have been nice if, at some point, he'd noticed that Andrew Jackson wasn't actually Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

An Applied Experiment

Inspired by Atrios' comments below, let's take Instapundit's invitation and compare the George Carlin civility indexes of Glenn Reynolds and Josh Marshall. Don't give me guff about "who cares?" or "what does this mean?" or "isn't comparing criticism of the Bush administration you disagree with to the Turner Diaries much less civil than using the word "piss"?" We have been informed that this is a highly meaningful comparison that will Embarrass The Left! Onward:

#1: Reynolds, 6 pages of hits. Heavens to Betsy, get me the smelling salts and the fainting couch! JMM, only 5.

#2: Reynolds: 5 pages of hits! Shocking! Marshall gets 2 pages, not all of them his.

#3: Reynolds: 4 pages of hits! Calling miss manners! Masrhall himself seems to have one usage, some more at the Horses' Mouth and/or its comments.

#4: Reynolds is clean. Give him a Fauntleroy Ribbon of Civileritude. With the spam eliminated, JMM is also clean.

#5 The word has appeared twice in Instapundit's hallowed pages, the horror! What will we tell the children!?!?! JMM is clean.

#6: Reynolds has allowed this word to appear twice! Oh my! JMM is clean.

#7: Appears chez Reynolds only once. His participation in the smear campaign against Jessica Valenti doesn't count because he avoided this word. Marhsall gets some hits but none referring to the female breasticle, so he's clean.

Anyway, the evidence is clear: Josh Marhsall is a Serious Thinker Interested In Ideas, while Glenn Reynolds is an uncivil potty mouth who can be safely ignored, QED.

...Ted Barlow, in the thread below: "There isn't much left of the dried up corpse of "South Park Republicanism", is there? Just the feeling of entitlement to mock minorities, then sneer and say "Jeez, just kidding."" Heh. Indeed!