A Fanboy's Snickering Acknowledgement - Look who's comics-blogging.

Weekly Fitness Blog Item - This was the week to finally start to suck less. The DC area's nearly-annual False Spring arrived - temps were in the high forties when the week began and hit 68 today. To celebrate, I began to come out of my winter hibernation, and just, the scales assure me, in time. Did two miles walking Monday at lunch, three miles yesterday morning and closer to five today, and lifted weights Friday night for the first time in two months. Meanwhile, today's scale reading was 168, my highest weight since July - proof positive that you can gain weight back very quickly if you let yourself go.

Given the degree to which my muscles have atrophied since Thanksgiving, the weight gain probably represents a good 10 pounds of fat. Atrophy: I lost between 10 and 20 pounds in lifting capacity for every exercise I did Friday. And my waist has hit 34" again.

On The Other Hand: this week's exercise felt really good. Even the thigh pain from the dumbbell squats is like a reassuring friend. I'm giving myself two months to get back to where I was, and I think I can make it. They Say that once you've trained muscles they bounce back pretty quickly after a layoff. We'll find out.

Nutrition supplement tip of the week: I finally stumbled on a way to make protein shakes as tasty as the Myoplex mixes I enjoyed but cheaper: Get a canister of unflavored protein powder, of the 25g per scoop kind. Pour two cups of skim milk into a blender, and add a scoop of powder. Regular skim milk is like 8g of protein per cup. For twice the price you can get "low carb" milk, which has 12g. Add a scoop of protein powder and you have 25g plus either 16 or 24 more grams of protein from the milk, depending on version.

NOW, to thicken it. Jello makes a sugar-free, fat-free Instant Pudding mix for 85 cents a 1.4-ounce box. Add the whole box to a pint (two cups) of skim milk and you have pudding. ADD HALF THE BOX to your milk-protein mixture and blend on high for thirty seconds and you have - a thick shake! I believe you can add less than half the box and get good results too, but I haven't tried it yet. I like to add a little vanilla extract too. Cost per shake:

Protein scoop - about $0.60
Milk - $0.40 (skim) - $0.80 (low carb)
Pudding mix - $0.30-0.40

Final Cost - $1.30-1.80.

That's not bad for something you can actually drink. Now that I'm lifting weights again, I'll be consuming these in place of some other meals.

So what the heck happened, anyway? Answer: in addition to going off exercise, I've been eating like a pig. I basically flipped my ratio of "free days" to careful days. Also, I got into fiber counting and stopped counting much else, including portions. Fiber is important, but you can gain weight while eating plenty of it.

What I did to prep for my marathon this week: the aforementioned exercises; started reading one of the books your Talking Dog sent me. It's a twenty-six week program for first-time marathoners, but it requires up to ten weeks of "pre-training" too - I'll need all of them. That puts me just about on track for one of the autumn races.

More next week. I may finally get around to discussing Doctor Atkins too.

Be the Eyes of Unqualified Offerings! - I read several liberal blogs, but not any that I've seen link to the important Mother Jones article about Clinton Administration bad faith in the matter of Iraq's weapons programs. So help me out here! Send me links to the liberal blogs that have cited this article, one way or the other. They must be out there, eh? Otherwise, Glenn Reynolds would sort of have a point.

A Fanboy Does Not Compute - People who follow comics news know that the big uproar is about Marvel putting the X-Men back in spandex costumes when Joss Whedon and John Cassaday start Astonishing X-Men in April. This has caused wailing and gnashing of teeth among fans of Grant Morrison's New X-Men run, now concluding, in which the first thing that Morrison did was take his charges out of flamboyant costumes and stick them in leather uniforms and biker jackets. The outrage is mildly ironic, in that devotion to the Morrison run signifies sophistication and the complaints about the clothing change have a whiff of You're messing with my continuity! about them. But one part isn't computing for me.

Observers are fitting the uniform change into the Marvel Shakeup Overstory, which goes like this: Avi Arad, head of Marvel's film division, elbowed aside former Marvel Comics president Bill Jemas because he believed Jemas was damaging the value of Marvel's licenses. Arad got sick of controversies over family-unfriendly storylines and the sort of controversy-courting that made "Nu Marvel" Nu Marvel in the first place. The edict went out to make the monthly series safe and non-controversial, for the sake of the trademark's movie appeal. Thus almost everything edgy and fun for grownups about Nu Marvel - save, so far, the Bendis-Maleev Daredevil - must go. And so the X-Men get tucked back into superhero outfits.

But how does this make sense? What did Bryan Singer's team do when they went to film the X-Men in the first place? They took them out of superhero costumes and put them into leather uniforms. So the overstory doesn't compute, or Ex-Nu Marvel doesn't even understand what made its characters movie-friendly. Which is it? Hey, you tell me.

Habits Can Be Habit-Forming - Atrios wonders where the New York State Health Department gets off declaring that only heterosexual marriages are valid in New York even though New York state law appears to be silent on the question. Maybe they're just used to that sort of thing. The constitutionally dubious delegation doctrine has had federal executive agencies essentially making law for decades now. If a similar doctrine holds in New York state politics, the Health Department surely figures it's supposed to make law. Legislators love delegation because it lets them dodge accountability. Gay marriage being a hot button issue, there are probably more than a few New York legislators happy to dodge the issue.

The minor problem is that delegation (at the national level) is an outrage against the Republic. (And I mean that in the nicest possible way.) Delegation has executive branch bodies making law, which is not what the executive branch is supposed to be doing. The administrative law court system has executive branch agencies holding "court" proceedings over their own rulings. Judging law is also not what the executive branch is supposed to be doing.

Anyway, Radley Balko is proposing a federal constitutional amendment against delegation. If Atrios throws his considerable influence behind it, maybe New York State will get the idea too.

I Wonder if Caligula's Horse Did This Well - In the How Convenient! department:

US senators' personal stock portfolios outperformed the market by an average of 12 per cent a year in the five years to 1998, according to a new study.

"The results clearly support the notion that members of the Senate trade with a substantial informational advantage over ordinary investors," says the author of the report, Professor Alan Ziobrowski of the Robinson College of Business at Georgia State University.

Via Calpundit and Marginal Revolution. More:

The Ziobrowski study notes that the politicians' timing of transactions is uncanny. Most stocks bought by senators had shown little movement before the purchase. But after the stock was bought, it outperformed the market by 28.6 per cent on average in the following calender year.

Returns on sell transactions are equally intriguing. Stocks sold by senators performed in line with the market the year following the sale.

Micha Ghertner at Cattalarchy sees a big opportunity for the whole country here. It just makes too much sense not to try it.

Ressentiment: It's What's for Breakfast - Glenn Reynolds observes the collapse of the prosecution's case in the Milosevic trial, and all it occasions is a certain peevishness that

No doubt we'll see handwringing, doubts about intelligence reliability, and charges that the Clinton Administration "sexed up" intelligence and misrepresented

Milosevic as a genocidal dictator in order to build support for unilateral action . . .

Yeah, right, that's going to happen.

As it happens, Glenn could have seen all those things years ago, just by following the writings of those libertarians who actually paid attention to foreign policy prior to September 12, 2001 rather than getting a crash course in international relations from Mark Steyn columns afterward.

Of course, it wasn't just libertarians. A petition against the Kosovo intervention lists, among other signatories, the American Legion, the American Spectator magazine, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Oliver North AND Lars Erik Nelson, Mother Jones AND the Manchester Union Leader, Harold Pinter AND - Virginia Postrel. (Those were the days.)

Point being, a whole panoply of people on the left and the right opposed the Kosovo War at the time, and called the Clinton Administration on its exaggerations and outright lies at the time. Some of us still bring it up occasionally.

Now, the natural libertarian response to finally discovering clear evidence that a previous administration misstated the case for war, during a time when the current administration has been accused of misstating the case for war, would seem to be to ponder lessons about the structure of government power, the potential for executive abuse of classified information and the need for skepticism about government claims. Instead, Glenn seems primarily to resent that the Bush Administration hasn't gotten the free ride he imagines the Clinton Administration to have gotten. I suppose this is that small-l libertarianism I keep hearing about. But it's a damn small l.

(Via Antiwar.com blog, which has some good links on the subject.)

Queer, Queer, Queer, with Bells Ringing and Banners Snapping in the Wind - Atrios is providing strong coverage of the graffiti on the Constitution proposal. Of several items, this one and this one and this one are especially good, and the recurring Atrios thesis that the Bush Administration is going to succeed in painting the Dems as "the party of gay marriage" anyway, so the Dems need to suck it up and make the case or be run over, seems pretty inarguable.

Sing It With Me Now - Happy birthday to you
Happy birthday to you
Happy birthday Neilalien's incomparable comics blog
Happy birthday to you!

Four years old, people. There are older blogs, but not a ton of older blogs. Four more years! (Likely my only chance to use this cheer in 2004.)

That's Just Wrong - Stone proprietor Marc strikes at the very foundations of our civilization. He must be stopped!

I didn't know about the semi-colon aspect, though.

My own language problem is different: Figuring out which words in a title should not be capitalized in orthodox, library-style titling. It's "the little words," I know, but deciding just which words in a given title are little is where I get befuddled. A lot of times I end up just capitalizing every word. But I feel guilty - guilty as Marc should feel when he sticks his commas outside the quote marks.

As I Was Saying - Lying about Iraq's capabilities didn't begin with the Bush Administration:

In fact, there is compelling evidence to suggest that the Clinton administration's false alarms on Iraqi weapons, like Bush's, were much more than just honest mistakes. One astonishing series of events in particular illustrates the ways in which the Clinton White House cleared the path for Bush's war.

That's from "A Legacy of Lies," by Seth Ackerman in the newest issue of Mother Jones. It's a good article to have to hand the next time some Bush Administration apologist repeats some statement by Clinton people to show that the current crowd weren't saying anything the previous bunch wasn't saying. That's true, but it doesn't mean what they want you to think it means.

No doubt the four liberal bloggers to whom I sent the link this afternoon will soon alert their much larger readerships to this important work. In the meantime, you elite coterie of Unqualified Offerings followers can revisit some familiar names, like Hussein Kamel and Kenneth Pollack. Ah, Kenneth Pollack - I was right about him, you know. Ackerman makes a convincing case that Pollack is still arguing in bad faith even in his recent mea sorta culpa in the Atlantic.

Hesiod was onto Hussein Kamel's defection and how his story had been misreported before the war. But Ackerman points out that it was Pollack's colleagues in the Clinton Administration that first distorted Kamel's debriefing:

There can be no doubt that the Clinton administration knew of Kamel's testimony - all of it - immediately. An August 1995 CIA intelligence report on Kamel's weapons briefing, in redacted form, was declassified in 1996, along with millions of other documents, as part of the Defense Department's investigation into Gulf War illness. The cable, headlined "Comments On Iraqi Weapons of Mass Destruction," is still publicly available on an online Defense Department database.

MotherJones.com has obtained a copy. It relayed to CIA headquarters the key points of Kamel's testimony: "Iraq has no Scuds left and is hiding no Scud missile components." Missile research was being conducted, but "the work is limited to what can be done on paper." On chemical weapons, "none remained in Iraq. Kamil stressed that no agent was hidden in Iraq, either VX or any other."

1995. For six years after that, the Clinton White House kept the meal warm until the Bush White House was ready to eat. If you like the war, even now, you should thank the Democratic Party for its role in letting you have it. (Mencken: "Democracy is the theory that the people know what they want and deserve to get it, good and hard.") If you don't like the war, don't thank anybody - anybody in government, at least.

Gaudy Several Evenings Later - Zed at MemeMachineGo has more on the science-fictional versus fantasy approaches to the superhero story. Well worth reading, though I'm not completely convinced that his two political attractors are the only possible poles of a science-fictional approach to superheroes. I think we're just waiting for someone to come up with a completely new way of addressing the problem. Zed does a great job of showing how deeply mined the existing paradigms have been, though.

Good Point - What I think Diana Moon is saying about Ahmed Chalabi and his "heroism in error" is true. (Diana: "And I do not agree that Uncle Sam is a sap.") Viewed in terms of his real customers and their desires, Chalabi and the INC provided value for value. The Bush Administration wanted excuses to go to war in Iraq; the INC came through. If the liberal fantasy that In a democracy, the government is us were true, you could say differently. But the INC wasn't working for us. They worked chiefly for themselves and secondarily for certain officials in the Defense Department and Vice President's office, including especially the top men at both those places.

Reading List - Stuff I haven't gotten to yet but mean to:

Tomorrow the World - Thomas Powers reviews An End to Eeeeevil!

Ex America by Garet Garrett.

A Prettier Jobs Picture? by Virginia Postrel.

The Much-Discussed "Pentagon Global Warming" Report in its entirety. From the intro: "The scientists support this project, but caution that the scenario depicted is extreme in two fundamental ways. First, they suggest the occurrences we outline would most likely happen in a few regions, rather than on globally [sic]. Second, they say the magnitude of the event may be considerably smaller."

I Got Your Vietnam Syndrome for You, Right Here - Nate has an interesting consideration of the Pentagon's use of private contractors in Iraq on jobs that would traditionally have been done by uniformed service members. Go there for the details. He also has a wealth of links to articles on Private Military Corporations. I'm just going to mention a couple of things that strike me:

1) As Nate says, contractor deaths are not counted among US military casualties, and reporting of them is spotty. If we added up the number of dead working for the military but not in it, our number might look a lot bigger than 545, today's death toll among US service members. As for the wounded . . .

2) So, back in the 1960s, there was this guy, Johnson. He wanted or felt obligated to fight a major land war in Southeast Asia but needed to keep the apparent costs as low as possible to preserve his domestic spending goals. So he printed more money to pay for it all. This time around, it looks like the cost being controlled is people - highly visible soldiers, dead and living. The contracting system exists to keep the troop count as low as possible, and keep the official casualties as low as possible. Once again, the government gives us accounting shenanigans to put Enron to shame, this time in blood more than treasure. (Not that there isn't plenty of that under the table.)

3) Libertarians at least long since got over assuming that mere "privatization" was necessarily a boon. There's a big difference between privatizing a railroad and privatizing an army. Privatize a railroad and it survives by wooing enough of a diverse transportation market to make money - it has to provide better value than competing ways of getting from place to place to many ordinary consumers. Privatize parking enforcement or an army and you have something else entirely. The company has a single customer, the government, and all manner of ways to keep the money rolling in that don't involve providing value for the money - influence peddling in all its forms.The first type of privatization serves the free market; the second, what goes by the trade name State Capitalism. And when the government privatizes one of its coercive functions, the incentives can be positively perverse.

4) I Got Your Revolutionary War Syndrome for You, Right Here! Folks, the United States of America, your country and mine, employs mercenaries. Let me ask this one more time: Is this really the kind of country you want?

Our Kind - Will Wilkinson considers that business about liberalism, education and academic bias, drawing on his own experience as a TA:

When I was TAing for Intro to Phil, and we were doing theism vs. atheism, it was all I could do to not make faces of exasperation and disapproval at the nuttily religious students.

There's plenty more. ("But if they really admitted how systematically shabbily and disrespectfully non-left students are treated, they know they'd have to change. I don't much blame them. But they know..")

My Little Blogosphere is Growing Up - Having started this site in the relatively early days of political blogging, I've found striking parallels in the growth of comics blogging. Neilalien's long and substantial caution against groupthink itself echoes things written back in the warblogging day.

But that doesn't mean it isn't important. Neilalien's concern is worth heeding. I'll only ever be a peripheral figure in comics blogging (another parallel!) because I have neither the time nor the inclination to be a completist about what I cover. But I should have said, anent the promises and perils of manga, that Brian Hibbs didn't sound all that stupid on the subject to me. I don't think manga is a mere fad, but the way publishers are jumping into it, it certainly looks like 2004 is a strong candidate for a bubble year. Bubbles don't just happen in markets and industries that are pure hype. Remember the dotcom bust? Sure you do. But your life is radically different than it was in, say, 1996 because of the internet, isn't it? Remember the days when you had to ask people for directions instead of plugging their addresses into Mapquest? Remember when figuring out who wrote a fondly-recollected song meant asking around until you found someone who knew? Remember a kajillion other things you did not do the way you do them now? That internet - there was something to it.

So even though manga has a loyal audience of readers, and even though it will probably still have readers after any bubble collapses, and even though we're probably just at the beginning of the bubble rather than its height, it will still be possible for careless vendors to lose tons of money selling manga over the next couple of years if they're not careful. I know a game store manager who will tell you that "Pokemon bought my house." I know that there are more game store managers who got stuck with too much stock once Pokemon was "over." The danger lurks for any lightly-capitalized business that tries to chase a rapidly-expanding but elastic market. I didn't see anything in Brian Hibbs original article that said anything more outrageous than that.

I would quibble with Hibbs on one thing: he points out that he doesn't have the expertise in-house to buy manga smartly. It seems at least possible that it would be worth his while to acquire that expertise. If he can't support the additional headcount now, then put it on the qualifications list for his next replacement hire. Even here it's worth admitting that my advice on that point is not so uncomplicated either. Hiring a manga expert means finding someone who will do merchandising on a retail clerk's salary. Almost certainly, Hibbs has to take a manga fan and teach her category management skills. But there's more to it than that. I don't know if you've noticed, but fans can be . . . fannish. They really like what they like, and often they disdain what they don't. We already don't lack for horror stories about store clerks dissing customer purchases, a cardinal retailing sin but one to which a hobbyist channel is especially prone. Manga is, as its enthusiasts never cease to point out, a very broad medium. Your manga "expert" could do your store more damage than not having one at all if you choose wrongly. So Hibbs needs someone young (aka cheap), knowledgeable, aware of and interested in what other manga fans enjoy, and trainable - someone with a head for figures and a grip on her own enthusiasms. Then, when she goes off to college next fall, he needs another one.

Speaking as a former bookseller, yeah, I'd try to find that young lady. But I wouldn't kid myself that it would be a cinch to do so.

Now just to avoid groupthink from the other end, I'll remind Neilalien that at least some comics bloggers have retail experience themselves. I think Shawn Fumo works in a bookstore, for instance. Absolutely, even my dozen years of chain store management do not equate to someone like Brian Hibbs or James Sime's long experience of running their own businesses, but some bloggers draw on at least a little relevant experience. I've probably been the biggest stick in the mud about manga's potential for renewing the field, while Shawn is one of its biggest enthusiasts. So even the retailer vote is split.

Anyway, the good news about groupthink is that as a blogosphere grows it becomes - many groupthinks! We have that to look forward to.

Conspiracy Theory - Speaking of Justin Raimondo's column today, the end of it suggests that Ralph Nader's decision to run for President may be more subtle than many Democrats who blame Nader for costing Al Gore the 2000 election think:

But if I were the Democrats, I wouldn't worry too much. For some reason, Nader has refused to run on the Green Party ticket, like the last two times: instead, he's launching an "independent" campaign, which means he has to petition to get on the ballot in all 50 states. This decision seems inexplicable, except when you really examine it . . .

In his interview with Tim Russert on "Meet the Press," Nader made it clear that he understands the huge obstacles put in front of insurgent candidates who challenge the bipartisan monopoly on the American electoral process. Surely he understands that he won't get on the ballot in more than 15 states at the most.

The ABB-ers point to Florida, where, they aver, Nader made the crucial difference: but the draconian ballot access laws in that state require 93,000 valid signatures on a petition to get an independent or third party candidate on the ballot. California, a Nader stronghold, requires a similarly formidable effort.

It is more than likely that Nader won't even be on the ballot in those two key states, and will be similarly absent from many others - and, while he can be counted on to make a big issue of this on the campaign hustings, it could be that this was the plan all along.

Could this be true? Did Nader ditch the Green Party so that he would stay off the ballot in select large battleground states? That is, has Nader deliberately structured his 2004 campaign so as to avoid costing the Dems any states? Because remember, it doesn't matter how many votes Ralph Nader gets nationally. It only matters how many votes he gets in states that are otherwise tossups.

Maybe this is why Nader is telling Democrats to "relax" about his newest run. Nader may even intend to do the Dems a favor. He attacks Bush while making Edwards or Kerry look "moderate." At the same time he exerts a certain sinister pull (hey! it just means "left!") not just on the campaign rhetoric but on the Democratic Party. That is, it may look, in his mind, like a left-liberal win-win.

Easy way to disconfirm this theory will be if he succeeds in getting ballot access in Florida and states like it (elector-rich and narrowly-divided). Other metrics will be murkier.

Tangled Web - The Iraqi Interim Governing Council says it can't make a deal on continued US basing rights in the country before sovereignty is handed over, according to Dexter Filkins in the New York Times. Not that we are worried:

Simply put, no Iraqi government could survive without the American forces, according to American commanders.

Isn't it great having wards?

Speaking of which, confirming the Unqualified Offerings theory that Justin Raimondo's columns' value varies inversely as the incidence of the I-word, today's I-word-free column is excellent on the "great having wards" theme, and that lovable scamp, Ahmed Chalabi, Hero in Error.

And on the Your Tax Dollars at Work front:

The Pentagon has set aside between $3 million and $4 million this year for the Information Collection Program of the Iraqi National Congress, or INC, led by Ahmed Chalabi, said two senior U.S. officials and a U.S. defense official.

according to a report in the Miami Herald. Also, the INC has announced that it is changing its name to the Iranian National Congress.

Anthraxblogging - The Hartford Courant sys the FBI may have a new target in the Anthrax probe.

Gaudy Morning After - Check out the shoes that Alison Krauss will wear to the Oscars. I want to declare my complete approval: it means that Krauss hasn't fallen into any bogus "authenticity" traps. I forget who it was who said that "country" authenticity was crap because any self-respecting real country gal, e.g. Dolly Parton, would wear two-million dollar shoes in a heartbeat.

In more directly relevant news, additional fallout from the "Tim O'Neil controversy" continues to flake down from the comics-blogging skies. Do not miss Sean Collins. Commencement:

In a film theory class I took my sophomore year at Yale, one of the films on the syllabus was Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo. We watched it, we enjoyed it, and that's no surprise. And when we began to discuss it, we naturally focused on the famous "Vertigo Shot"--that weird camera effect produced by simultaneously tracking back and zooming in, used in Vertigo to convey Scottie's paralyzing fear of heights.

Dave Fiore talks about genre, and Rose Curtin of Peiratikos distinguishes metaphor and allegory.

See also Forager 23 and Dave Intermittent, who tackles another angle I left aside, Tim's questionable assertion that only the original creators of a character can really do vital work on that character.

Gaudy Night - Note: The following post ended up much longer than I imagined it would and I don't have time to make it shorter. If you always skip the comics items, even the ones with political substance to them, you can skip down to here for another long item bashing liberals, and below that, a short one bitching about the war. This was "cover all bases day." Now then, on with the Fanboy's Note:

Picked up The Comics Journal 258 this week, because it's the special Steve Ditko issue and I wanted to better appreciate his career, most of which I know only through writing about his career.

Anyway, Tim O'Neil had a review of Grant Morrison's The Filth in the same issue, in which he spent surprising amount of review space lamenting that anyone talented would work on superhero comics, calling superheroes "inherently uninteresting." Dave Fiore had the same "says you!" reaction that I did, and contacted Tim. Tim generously expanded on his remarks in the review, leading me to two conclusions:

1) Says you! again;
2) Tim really is the natural successor to Dirk Deppey!

Teasing out the principles from the pragmatisms of Tim's argument is difficult work. For instance, at one point, he complains about the conclusion to Grant Morrison's run on Animal Man, an acclaimed series for DC's Vertigo imprint. But his own text makes it clear that this was early in Morrison's career and he simply hadn't fully matured as a writer yet, so the fact that the misstep took place in a superhero title seems beside the point. I can't even remember how Craig Thompson's graphic memoir Blankets ends, but that has everything to do with Thompson's own immaturity as a writer and nothing to do with the validity of the art comic per se.

The pragmatisms are familiar enough and have considerable truth to them - all the stuff you know about the economics of the field and the pressures of periodical publication. But Tim goes beyond the practicalities. He claims that superhero comics are inherently uninteresting.

From my point of view, Tim has a deficient sense of play. As I read his item, it reveals that he is only comfortable with either something he thinks of as realism, or a particular kind of mixture of realism and fantasy that he believes the superhero story cannot attain:

Because the thing that gets to me about superheroes is that, ultimately, they're just inherently stupid. You can hem and haw all day about their metaphorical underpinnings but at the end of the day they’re too detached from reality to really say anything significant. People don't dress in funny costumes and run around on rooftops beating each other up - they don't gain superpowers and devote themselves to the common good - they don't form clubs and societies to combat evil scientists and giant purple starfish. None of these things (especially the damn purple starfishes) have any bearing or relation to reality as we know it.

The best science-fiction and fantasy stories can approach the most bizarre and unbelievable situations and imbue them with plausibility through psychological depth. Failing that (as is the case with Tolkien) writers can suspend disbelief by creating a plausible alternative to conventional psychological and societal mechanisms. Superheroes just don't work when you look at them too closely because they supposedly inhabit a world very similar to our own. The only reason the stories work at all at this point is through the virtue of a Byzantine series of genre conventions, ossified and hardened by generations of recycling, and increasingly incoherent to the uninitiated.

This strikes me as wrong at nearly every turn, though I'll grant the fact of ossified conventions. (I just think the stories work despite those conventions as much as because of them.) Two passages in the excerpt strike me as key. First the conflation of "science-fiction and fantasy," and the argument that both types of stories "work" the same way. Fantasy, at least, works (usually) by externalizing what are in our world internal conflicts, or by personifying abstract principles: making characters of ideas. Science fiction can do this too, but needn't. While science fiction and fantasy are shelved together in bookstores, the imperatives, opportunities and pleasures of the two genres overlap only - they are not everywhere the same.

The superhero story is a sub-genre of fantasy. Tim seems stuck trying to fit it into SF instead, noticing that it doesn't fit and concluding that it must be a bad part, not seeming to see the distinction between the setting where it doesn't fit (SF) and the setting where it does (fantasy).

Now maybe externalizing internal conflicts and personifying abstract principles are things Tim had in mind as "a plausible alternative to conventional psychological and societal mechanisms," but I get the impression that he was thinking more of alien psychology and sociology. Thus his subsequent objection that superheroes "supposedly inhabit a world very similar to our own." That is, they inhabit a world whose psychology and sociology are not, theoretically, alien. Again, this is only a problem if you draw the false equation fantasy = science fiction.

Thesis: science fiction must use the methods of naturalism; fantasy may use the methods of expressionism.

But there's another problem with the excerpt, Tim's objection that "People don't dress in funny costumes and run around on rooftops beating each other up - they don't gain superpowers and devote themselves to the common good - they don't form clubs and societies to combat evil scientists and giant purple starfish." No. And we don't have faster-than-light spacedrives either (dammit!). But what if we did, we sometimes ask? What would that mean? Not just the interesting but hardly cosmic question of what it would do to the future history of our world, but it also invites the question of what life would mean in the context of FTL travel. What would it do or not do to one's understanding of one's own and other people's personhood?

Well who the hell cares, right? In the Real World (where nobody forms clubs and societies to combat giant purple starfish), we don't have FTL flight, so what difference could it possibly make? The less important answer is, we might get it, and speculative fiction might give us fair warning of the existential dislocations to come. The more important answer is that understanding how our sense of meaning might change may provide a perspective on how it already is. The reason this is a more important answer is that science fiction has a terrible record of predicting technological innovation.

People don't gain superpowers and fight each other on rooftops. (Some very few of them do dress in costume and combat "evil." It's a big planet.) But the first point is merely tautological: people don't gain superpowers because people don't gain superpowers. On our current understanding of science, just about any superpower you can name is exactly as impossible as faster-than-light travel, which is to say, entirely. If our understanding changes such that physical law allows FTL travel after all, it won't change the fact that hundreds of shelf-yards of stories about FTL travel were written when it was flat-out, absolutely impossible according to "the real world."

"Gaining superpowers" is not more absurd, scientifically, than faster-than-light travel. It is as legitimate an object of fictional speculation. So one question is, if people gained superpowers, would anybody dress up in costumes and fight on rooftops, devote themselves to the common good or try to take over the world?

I can't see why the hell they wouldn't.

Here's a core truth I've noticed about the Real World. Maybe Tim has too: people are as outlandish as they can afford to be. No, not everyone. Not even most people, most of the time. But did you watch the Super Bowl halftime show? Seen Croc Files? Made a casual study of rapper aliases and street gang names? Noticed the proliferation of volunteer fire departments and neighborhood watch groups? Browsed the latest fashions on the runways of Milan? Hear about the guy with the beard in Central Asia behind some globe-spanning conspiracy to restore the glories of "The Caliphate" with himself at the head?

We are one outrageous fucking planet. If some of us could fly or shoot rays from our hands, I wouldn't put anything past us.

So we can't even rule out the viability of the superhero story as science fiction. We might suspect that most people with these awesome powers would keep it to themselves, or find some legal way to turn them to their advantage or, if too dull-witted to manage that, use them for illegal gain. But the world does not lack for do-gooders or busy-bodies (take your pick) as it is. A world of superpowes wouldn't either. And you tell those stories for the same reasons you tell the ones about outer space and FTL drives - to reflect back on the world we know.

As it happens, the science-fictional approach is what has been done to death the last twenty years. The Authority and Stormwatch scribbled in the margins of Alan Moore's Miracleman stories, and that was your political SF. X-Force played variations on Peter Parker's early career as a professional wrestler, and that was your social SF. We've had quite a lot of examination of how superheroes would interact with existing political structures and current celebrity culture, a lot of it quite good.

Me, I'm over that stuff. That doesn't mean someone won't find something else to do with the naturalistic, science-fictional approach to the superhero story. But because of my personal boredom, I currently consider it a trap. Because by the logic of science fiction, you must deal with the question of how the existence of superpowered people would affect the world. "Realistically," you can't escape dealing with these topics. Science fiction demands that the world of the story be "plausible," or at least as recognizably implausible as our own.

But that's not what interests me about superheroes right now. I'm interested in the superhero story as a way to address a set of ethical conundra that exists irrespective of sociopolitical impacts. (The Bendis run on Daredevil, by sticking to a more intimate scale than other naturalistic superhero comics, has managed to do both at once.) I want to get past the science fiction and into the fantasy - the externalization and personification I talked about above. And I don't want to bother with what the UN does about it. That story's been told. (And retold.) That's not to say I want to dispense with psychological complexity or political complexity as values. Not at all. I want to shift the focus from the culture at large (media, government, commerce) to the culture writ small (these folks over here). The step over the business about the UN and Entertainment tonight is as much fantasy as the step into powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal men in the first place. But it's a step worth taking.

Unless you're just not into that sort of thing.

(Postscript: A Rose Curtin blog item and her comments on same are very much worth your time. From a comment: "[Superheroes are] perfect metaphors for a lot of things, which I find so fascinating. I think it's that lack of specificity, lack of groundedness that lets people make whatever identifications they want. It really has to do with any kind of devotion or single-mindedness or dedication, I think. Or leaders or people working in groups or corporate drones, even . . . ")

When All the Time There's This Great Plank in Your Own - Matthew Yglesias picked up on a Volokh thread about whether stupid people are conservative, smart people are liberal and, one presumes, people of average intelligence are moderates, and writes

This is all well-and-good, but the fact remains that people with a lot of schooling really do tend to be liberals.

It seems like just last month liberal bloggers were proclaiming the left wing bias of academia a myth. (See Kevin Drum and Jesse Taylor and letters from Kevin and Chad Orzel to me.) Oh wait. It was just last month. Now Matt is gently suggesting that there's something to this education makes you liberal stuff after all. ("Indeed, the right normally lauds this fact," Matt continues, "liberalism is for wussy 'intellectuals' and 'special interest groups' (i.e., black people) while regular (white) people vote Republican."

Anyway, don't worry about me. I can keep up.

What may be happening here is a familiar phenomenon: "progressives" tend to forget what they know about perceived self-interest, and class interest, when it comes time to explain themselves. If you see higher education as not just a system of transmitting wisdom but a process of reinforcing a set of values and a sense of identity, the "liberalism" of the highly-schooled seems easy enough to explain. Modern liberalism as it has evolved from the Progressive Movement period forward is an ideology of managerialism. Unruly society needs guidance to overcome the "short-sighted" perspectives of economic actors and citizens. American managerialist liberalism abjures absolute control over the totality of daily life, at least in theory, but still believes that there needs to be "someone at the wheel."

In some ways, the liberal managerialist vision may be even more attractive than the Leninist one to intellectuals, and this may have as much to do with its outlasting Leninism as the fact that the American-liberal version of Vanguard Theory is more in touch with reality than outright socialism proved to be. Under communism, the ruling class has to do even the scut work of planning - running the factories, deciding where every box of pencils gets shipped and so on. In American managerialism, aka liberalism, the Vanguard only has to do the cool jobs. The boring stuff (to your Kennedy School type) is outsourced to Republicans, Chamber of Commerce types who get a long leash but still must, when the government speaks, obey.

Plus, in the managerial-liberal state, the managerialist has the additional frisson of knowing how tough his job is. She or he does not have the socialist's conviction that of course an entire political economy can be guided from above by a sure hand. Rather, she or he has some sense that society is as massive and complex as a rodeo animal (the metaphor probably isn't the one that comes to her mind), as inertial as a tractor-trailer. The managerialist doesn't imagine that she can rewire the guts of the bronco - it will still be what it is - but judicious pressure should suffice to prevent it careering into the rails and keep it pointed in the right direction.

What is the "right direction" is subject to change, of course, and guess who decides.

Anyway, the last three paragraphs are a detour from what I set out to write, a bit of off the cuff speculation. Getting back the the idea of "someone at the wheel," the central metaphor for the welfare state, the point is simply that there is no shortage of willing hands, One way to look at it is that since managing a society is conceived as an intricate undertaking, naturally it is seen as requiring specialized training. That means the willing hands will be in school for awhile. The managerial class is large. It includes not just elected and appointed officialdom, but the class of civil servants and, around them, the advocacy groups and journals of opinion. The longer anyone spends in post-secondary education, particularly in the departments dedicated to training "the leaders of tomorrow" - political science, administration, education and the other humanities departments that even Chad Orzel's letter concedes skew left politically - the more likely they are to know, like and identify with the trainees. Shared circumstance becomes shared values - that would seem to be the very meaning of class consciousness.

Matt is a great guy. I get to see him every couple of months, on average, at blog-related gatherings, and I always look forward to it. He makes relatively little money and lives on a dodgy block. But because of his job with the American Prospect and the connections there and from Harvard, Matt is a junior member in good standing of the managerial class, and one with a bright future ahead of him because of his talent and energy. Because Matt is a great guy, people that know people like him are unlikely to find the type inherently frightening or alien. People that don't know a lot of Matts - country people, business people, people who majored in other subjects, you name it - are more likely to see the managerial class purely in terms of the power it wields, to regard it as the bronco regards the rider.

This has everything to do with why the white working class is not as reliably liberal as liberals think it should be.

But there's another way of looking at it too. I follow Matt's philosophy posts as best I can, and his point about the unpopularity of consequentialism among philosophers has relevance:

[C]onsequentialism suffers from a fatal flaw as a moral philosophy. Namely, it doesn't lend itself to the construction of normative philosophical ethical or political theories, since it implies that you ought to be asking an economist or a sociologist or a political scientist what to do and not a philosopher. Thus, folks who study philosophy and become convinced that consequentialism is correct are not likely to make careers for themselves as moral philosophers. They'll either do work in metaphysics, epistemology, etc. or else not do philosophy at all, leaving the moral philosophy jobs to be taken by sundry Kantians or Williams/Nussbaum-style mysterians. Something similar could be said about philosophy of mind and identity theory.

Turning this around, we can see that departments of political science and public administration will be happiest with a world view that maximizes the amount of politics and bureaucracy. Conservatism figures we already know how society should be run. Conservatives don't need managers, they need police. Libertarians figure society can largely run itself. Libertarians need all kinds of things, but not a lot of politicians or civil servants. Liberalism's two rivals lose by default.

The other class interest angle is revenge, but I've written about that before.

Incubator Tales II - I've been wondering for a year and a half what the successor would be to the famous "testimony" of "Nayirah" before Gulf War Phase I, about how Iraqi troops were dumping premature babies on the floor of Kuwaiti hospitals so they could ship the incubators back to Iraq, which turned out to be a concoction of the fabulists at Hill and Knowlton. Brendan O'Neill suggests in a new Spectator article that the "story" (the word takes on new meaning) that Saddam fed his political opponents into shredders is a strong candidate.

Saddan Hussein tortured and executed his enemies regardless, but that doesn't mean the shredder fable "doesn't matter." If it didn't matter, they wouldn't have made it up. The world is full of leaders who torture and execute their political opponents. The purpose of the shredder tale was to provoke an emotional reaction unique to just one of those leaders, and get citizens to put their emotions in the place proper to their intellects.

Harbinger - Robins. Not just the first robin of the year - they all came back at once and set themselves up in my backyard.

Took You Long Enough - I left out the actual link to Leonard Dickens' rebuke of Tacitus in this morning's item on that subject. I just added it, though.

Questions You Weren't Really Asking, Answered - Why I don't do all that much breaking news-blogging.

More reasons: It looks like I was completely wrong on the authorship of the Zarqawi memo. The real story was that the complete missive signified pretty much the opposite of what casual browsers imagined.

I Am So There - Justin Logan made my list for me. (Via Cal Ulmann.)

Meanwhile, the inverse war for my vote continues, as The Nation magazine avows that "Progressives Should Vote Edwards." (Via the Sideshow.)

Right Here Right Now - Seeing the pictures and the poem on Electrolite, seeing that the couples continue to come to the city offices, seeing that it's spreading - New Mexico today, maybe Chicago on Monday - I found myself thinking two words: Berlin Wall.

It can happen very, very quickly, very, very peacefully and with the gravest joy, when the barriers fall.

Quickie Comics Blogging - On the political comics for college course front, Julian Sanchez writes in to say "The most obvious omission is the Robert-Anton-Wilsonian series 'The Invisibles' (Grant Morrison). Also, Persepolis." Meanwhile, Forager 23 rewrites the syllabus. I largely concur with his reasoning, though I think the High Society volume of Cerebus stands on its own in a way that Church and State does not.

Grand Compr-um, Never Mind - From Julian Sanchez through Max Sawicky to Kevin B. O'Reilly, with the briefest of stops for me: everything you need to know about the possibility of a left-libertarian alliance on the budget. Julian, by the way, clarified in an e-mail to me, Max and others that he wasn't proposing an alliance with the left Left to close the deficit but with the center-left. For all the reasons Max cites, there can't be any permanent alliance between libertarians and the left. My view is that libertarians need to be ready to work with any faction on any issue where goals dovetail. That means working with the Congressional Black Caucus types on drug war issues and against the same people on affirmative action, for example. And I'm not settled on it yet, but I incline to the view that libertarians should try to get John Kerry elected and then try to thwart him at every turn.

The Little Terrorist Platoons - Speaking of Gene Callahan, he was one of a couple people to e-mail re the vexed question of why there have been no further attacks by al Qaeda on US territory since that other one. Gene writes

Isn't it a lot simpler than any of these theories? The last major, purportedly al Qaeda attack on US soil was the WTC bombing in 93. So, I'd say al Qaeda has the resources to stage a major attack in the US about once a decade. If we don't hear from them for 20 years or so, then we might say the Bush strategy is "working."

Two data points don't make a trend, but there's something to this. Not sure if it's a known unknown or an unknown unknown, though.

Loyal Reader Herman Yam writes

[UO wrote] "It offends my libertarian sensibilities to think that an ill-bred NGO like Al Qaeda needs active support of a government to accomplish a specific attack."

I suppose I am confused by your use of "ill-bred."

If your mean it along the lines of Al Qaeda being stupid, inefficient, in disarray or something, then why should it be surprising they needed government help? I have never researched the topic in detail, but there are probably many incompetent NGOs out there that would be doomed without some kind of government support in the form of contracts or institutional legitimacy. As a fellow metro DC resident, you probably know of or even worked at a for profit corporation that would otherwise be killed in the marketplace.

If you mean "ill-bred" like evil and destructive, well then take heart. The ELF/ALF in this country are destructive, though not at the volumes Al Qaeda would seek, and receive no government help that I can fathom except that some of the Green NGOs sympathetic to them have 501c3 status. Ditto for my abortion clinic booming coreligionists.

Well I feel better now.

Zizka's e-mail picks up more from Alan Sullivan's item than mine, but I don't suppose Zizka and Alan would make such great correspondents

"Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Egypt, Syria, Iran, Pakistan, Yemen, Sudan, Libya".

Sounds like a grab-bag and a warrant for war against whomever.

Start off with Saudi Arabia, where al Qaeda has been tolerated and bought off for over a decade. Count the Sudan and Yemen as Saudi puppets.

Scratch Libya. Not only is Qaddafi trying to change his image, but Osama tried to kill him once. Not all bad guys are friends.

Pakistan's complicity with the Taliban was enormous and with al Qaeda was considerable, and the ex-Taliban and al-Qaeda still operate in Pakistan (in a border area that's never been controlled, though).

Egypt is like Pakistan and Saudi Arabia as an authoritarian government which is actually very weak, fragile, and tenuous. So in part they tolerate al Qaeda because they have no choice.

Iraq, Syria -- like Libya these are bad guys, but probably least likely to play much with al Qaeda because they understand that Osama (or whoever the new leader is) wants to overthrow them. Two secular states with big ambitions. "We will never agree because we both want the same thing -- Paris". Not likely to invite another stallion into their harem.

Iran isn't secular but they have their own program which for many reasons doesn't fit Osama's.

My guess is that Osama's tacit support comes mostly from America's authoritarian but weak allies. Pakistan, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia are less successfully authoritarian than the ones I excluded, and all seem to survive by a mix of repression and cutting deals. These governments aren't "worse" than Iraq, Syria, Libya, or Iran -- they might be better in many respects -- but they seem more likely to turn a blind eye to al-Qaeda's outside activities just to avoid having to deal with them.

Another Tac - It's been a busy week around here, which is one of the things that has kept me from getting back to various aspects of the issue with Tacitus. The other problem is that it strikes me as one of those situations where someone is so wrong you hardly know where to start. During my period of sloth, Gene Callahan devoted his most recent column to one part of Tac's original item, his characterization of libertarian foreign policy as "Kitty Genovese syndrome." Gene's argument seems to work best for hard core anarcho-capitalists and goodness knows, I am not one. A minor aside to Gene, Tacitus reports that he has volunteered to rejoin the army since September 11, which speaks well of him if not Jonah Goldberg.

Leonard Dickens came at the argument from roughly the same perspective Tuesday, but despite the fact that Leonard says that I "made the fundamental mistake of accepting Tacitus' worldview" there's a lot in Leonard's item that I can grab onto, especially his conclusion:

You'd think that the idea of using the state to achieve secular salvation would have died with the Soviet Union - but no, only the idea of domestic socialism was discredited. War socialism is alive and well in the American Right.

That strikes me as entirely correct, and it's a point I've meant to come back to. But like I said in Monday's item (or was it Tuesday?), once you get past the question of whether any specific group has "targetted Americans" where, and get into questions of why we shouldn't necessarily use American military force to fix all the Bad Things at the end of Tacitus' second item, you're getting into very basic issues. Among other things, you have to navigate the zone where principle and pragmatism collapse into each other. Topic Sentence: Do you believe in Hayek, and if you do, does Hayek stop at the water's edge? My short answers are "Absolutely" and "Absolutely not." Long answers forthcoming.

UPDATE: Doh! Just added the link to Leonard. I always screw stuff up like that during morning blogging.

War and Epistemology - Post headline today: "Forces' Return From Iraq Unknown." Ah, but is that a known unknown or an unknown unknown? I'm thinking the former: we know we don't know it, right? Or should there also be a category for "former knowns," since I believe that at one point before the war the Administration "knew" that the troops would be home within a few months.

Quickie Fanboy's Note on the Bookstore Biz - Shawn and Sean: Those endcaps? The publisher pays for them. It's called a Retail Display Allowance and is standard across retail sectors. (Waldenbooks brought the concept from grocery stores to the book business during the Harry Hoffman era in the 1980s. Ask me how I know.)

Let's be clear: The fact that the publisher pays for the endcap space doesn't mean that the bookstore has no faith in manga. RDAs are, in the ideal world, a win-win for publisher and bookstore. At the very least, a manga endcap means that Tokyopop or Viz or whoever bought the display believe they can sell well if prominently featured in bookstores. And often the chain marketers will actually make the first approach - a "Why don't you do this?" thing. Of course, that's a sales function, and no guarantee that the endcap really will succeed on terms either party recognizes as success. (Believe me: there are unsuccessful endcap displays out there.)

Standard disclaimer: Not saying that manga popularity is a mirage. Just getting a fact straight.

But the murder of Danny was like a hijacked plane sent to explode in the heart of your company - Marianne Pearl accuses the Wall Street Journal of indifference to whether justice will be done to the kidnappers and murderers of her husband, their employee.

Where is the Other Shoe? Redux - Alan Sullivan considers the same Charles Krauthammer column that I did. His own variant:

No, I think there is another explanation altogether for the reprieve from further attack. I suspect the assistance of governments was essential for al Qaeda to mount major operations. In addition to Afghanistan, I imagine that some or all of the following countries were directly complicitous: Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Egypt, Syria, Iran, Pakistan, Yemen, Sudan, Libya. For various reasons, leaders of these countries tried to use al Qaeda, but the djinn escaped the magicians. All those sheiks, generals, and presidents-for-life have been holding their breaths since 9/11, as American troops trashed the regimes of Afghanistan and Iraq like rotten fruit. Al Qaeda has no friends now, and it is throwing its remaining assets into Iraq, where they will be destroyed.

I'd go along with this part way. It offends my libertarian sensibilities to think that an ill-bred NGO like Al Qaeda needs active support of a government to accomplish a specific attack. But there can be no doubt that passive acquiescence by some number of governments makes things a lot easier on an underground organization, and there's a lot less of that for AQ these days.

Passive Aggressive - Julian Sanchez makes an excellent point about the use of the word "alleged" in journalism.

That's What I Meant - Below I said that having Fidel Castro show up at the end of Captain America #23 might have worked "if [author Robert] Morales had established that this storyline was to be zany," but "zany" probably wasn't the best possible description of the required tone. This Forager 23 passage makes it clear that Castro could have shown up in The Dark Knight Strikes Again and nobody would have thought twice about it:

DK2 represents everything Miller loves about super-hero comics--the garish circus -like atmosphere, the exaggerated moral struggles, the love of both meaningless and purposeful action . . .

Yes, that's it. You don't have to write superhero comics that way, but all the thrashing about clears plenty of space for outre drop-ins.

Comics Reviews - A few things I've read lately, but not Paul Hornschemeier's Mother, Come Home, which deserves its own entry.

Pop Gun War, by Farel Dalrymple. In some ways, this black and white fantasia about a city kid named Sinclair who finds an angel's discarded wings is like a Vertigo comic with less disembowelling. The action takes place in some Brooklyn of the mind. The supernatural is fully present, at least to the main characters, and largely accepted. Some characters, like the teen who torments the homeless Addison, seem to be real person, supernatural being and someone else's mental state all at the same time. The art style we might call grunge. For instance, Dalrymple seems to draw a lot of things freehand - e.g. curb lines - where many other artists would use straight edges. (Say, more freehand at least.) And he uses some deliberately scratchy inks. But he cleans it up right quick in an Addison dream sequence - he's an artist in complete control of his medium. And I daresay that Chapter 5, "Bicycle Messenger," offers the same mix of Silver Age superhero and 50s horror comic sensibilities that Bruce Baugh rightly found in early 1960s Marvels. Pop Gun Wars is not a superhero comic. It just has, among other things, a superhero story in it .

I liked this book a lot the other night when I read it. I like it even more now telling you about it. Go buy it. It's only $14. And you can actually read Chapter 5 by going to Beguiling.com's Dalrymple art sales page, by viewing all the pages of Pop Gun War #5 in sequence. OTOH, that's the ending, and you maybe ought to save it.

Sleeper: Out in the Cold, by Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips. Collects the first six issues of the ongoing series about a super-powered deep cover agent, Holden Carver, inside a globe-spanning conspiracy. The man who sent Holden undercover, the only man who knows Holden is really working for what passes for the Good Guys, lies in a coma. Holden has to do awful things to maintain his cover. This being a "mature readers" book, some of them are awful indeed. (Plus, more nipples than a Super Bowl halftime!) A dark book. "Dark and deep?" we always ask, mindful that Mr. Frost pointed out that one is not necessarily the other. Nah. Uncompromising treatments of the dilemmas of the double agent are new to superhero/supervillain comics, but have been well-mined in novels and, very occasionally, film. Because the "Wildstorm Universe" comes pre-darkened for us - it seems like a hundred different globe-spanning conspiracies secretly control the place, like a timeshare - it's not as if Carver has a whole lot of lights out there somewhere throwing his greys and gloss blacks into relief. We're dealing with a protagonist who doubtless wasn't such a nice guy to begin with - a lifelong covert operative before he ever became a pretend supervillain, working for one of those agencies that grows fat in the shadows while the sensitive types in its employ assure themselves that worrying about the morality of their actions is itself, somehow, morality.

There is one passage where the Abyss opens: "the harshest origin story ever," which belongs to Carver's girlfriend. Other than that, what we have here is a really well-done action-aventure story. But it is a really well-done adventure story. The dialogue is lively hard-boiled talk, there's a lot of story in each chapter, Carver takes increasingly greater risks on behalf of something approaching decency as the story continues and the art is quite fine. And people who have read the subsequent (uncollected) issues say they're even better. I certainly plan to pick them up when I can.

Sgt. Rock: Between Hell and a Hard Place, by Brian Azzarrello and Joe Kubert. A beautiful hardover original set in the closing days of the war. Rock's Easy Company takes four German prisoners. Suddenly three of them are dead, one is missing and Rock suspects that one of his guys killed them. That would be a war crime, and while some of his men figure that killing Germans is what they're there for after all, Rock has not just read the manuals but internalized them, and he can't let it go.

I really liked this book. The colors are wonderful - muted winter pastels that the monthly comics of Rock's heyday could never have managed. There's a sequence involving an attempt to destroy a German Tiger that generates real tension, and another with a land mine that generates more. Azzarrello's dialogue is on and off, but in one sequence, when a new recruit recounts a New Orleans bar fight, he manages to bridge the cultural and linguistic gap between comics geekdom today and working class culture then. Rock himself is appealingly underplayed - he's no scene-chewing Nick Fury.

I wish I had the vocabulary to praise Kubert's art. (I wish I weren't typing this from the memory of two weeks ago, too. That would help.) He is most of the reason for the tension of the two scenes discussed above, and renders a death toward the beginning of the book that is gruesome in an appropriately matter-of-fact way. The one problem I had probably stems from genre - in medium-length and distant group shots, since the soldiers are all in uniform, it can be a bit hard to tell who's who. Kubert carefully gives each soldier's uniform some unique markers, but sometimes the composition renders those differences necessarily insignificant.

Kubert was (just) before my time. He was winding up his DC career while I was still a Marvel zombie, and I knew him mainly as the name on the cartoonist school. Not the least virtue of this book is it lets people like me see what was so great about him. Was? Is.

The Furies, by Mike Carey and John Bolton. Now in paperback. Okay, this one is for existing Sandman fans, with no concessions for people who don't already know the tragic story of Hippolyta Hall, her stolen, somewhat murdered child and the awful revenge she sets in motion. But there are a lot of Sandman fans out there, and this aftershock is worth experiencing.

It's a comedy. In the classical sense. (Not farce.) But if you're a Sandman reader, this book gives you the pleasure of watching Lyta go sane. Lyta gets mixed up in a plot by the Titan Cronus (Carey's spelling, don't blame me) to better his station. Along the way, Carey rubs some very nice people's faces in the uncompromising stance on "blood guilt" the Eumenides embodied. The book is sort of like Pop Gun War with more disembowelling. Okay, not really. But as someone who loved Sandman but feels that Vertigo could stand to lighten up once in awhile, I really enjoyed this book. John Bolton paints rather than draws. I like the look of it, particularly the sun-washed Greek scenes. There are a couple of closeups with word balloons coming out of someone's mouth that just don't work. This seems to happen to me with painted comics generally - what I accept without question when drawn sticks out when painted.

Final art bonus: Lyta is painted as a perfectly attractive woman, but not one constantly at risk of tipping forward, if you get my drift. Dignity, always dignity.

Captain America #22 and 23, by Robert Morales and Chris Bachalo. Dammit dammit dammit. This sequence started out so damn well. Issue 21 excited me at the prospect that Morales actually knew what to do with the character. And right through the first couple of pages of 22 I was fully on board - Morales actually inserts a manifesto during a scene when Cap and his girlfriend attend a gallery opening. It takes balls to stick a manifesto right into your work. The early indicator of trouble was that the art gallery scene dialogue wasn't quite as good as it needed to be. And it's been all downhill from there. For one thing, the story feels padded in what has become the stereotypical manner. For another, Morales just can't seem to get a handle on either his plot or his characters. He's brought a bunch of army officers over from Central Casting to populate his internment camp mess hall, and their dialogue just isn't quite as good as it needs to be either. And nothing but nothing is getting explained so far - what relation the guys who shot at Cap's car in Issue 21 bear to the prisoners escaping from Camp X-Ray in Issue 23, how said prisoners escaped etc. The ending of 23, when Fidel Castro shows up, might have worked if Morales had established that this storyline was to be zany, but he did no such thing.

And the art! I am sure there is a genre out there that suits Bachalo's talents, maybe even a character. But it isn't Captain America. Bachalo's male figures are lumpen and bereft of grace. (Contrariwise, he draws fine slim women of Asian descent. Go figure.) They are bottom-heavy, lead-footed claymation creatures who could not possibly be capable of anything more fluid than stop motion, and not with a high frame speed either.

Will this character defeat everyone who tries to write him? Maybe he will. Maybe Morales is just getting his Cap legs under him still. There have been flashes of real promise in his first three issues. I'm willing to give him one more storyline to figure it out - if Marvel gives him that time. Bachalo is a disaster for this series, though. But at least we know that Cap can be drawn well, if not necessarily so written. Get a new artist; give Morales some more practice. That's the Unqualified Offerings Prescription.

Weaker Fitness Blog Item - I've got a toothache and an early meeting tomorrow, so Dr. Atkins, Tacitus and everyone else is going to have to wait. I leave you with two items that came to me via Diana Moon. First, a War Nerd column from the eXile on Muammar Qadafi, wimp. It's entertaining in a gonzo-standard way. And it contains this rather important aside, considering all the other discussion going on around here:

First thing to realize is that Reagan was a closet peacenik, a real disappointment to guys like me who thought he'd release the dogs of war that Carter'd been keeping penned up.

When you think about it, it's true. The Reagan Administration was actually quite chary about committing American power. Would that subsequent Republican Administrations had its discretion.

Second, an awful Pat Buchanan column from Antiwar.com. I realize there are many out there who consider the previous sentence to be an example of the purest redundancy, but I think Buchanan has written some much better columns in the last two years. This one reads like a sixth-grade history book for Republican loyalists - the President, a good man, gets "captured" by neoconservative zealots and so on.

I am none too fond of neoconservative foreign policy, nor neoconservative domestic policy neither. But, um, if the President decides to take all his advice from one set of Republican Party insiders and not another, whose fault is that? It's not as if the Lugars and Hagels and Bakers and, far more important, all the people who have staffed their offices over the years weren't around and willing to tell the President what they thought. Yes, the National Greatness Conservatives are the Sugar Industry Group of interventionist foreign policy - your highly-motivated lobby with all the political advantages political theory leads us to expect.

But if you're the President, you're the boss. And who you listen to is your responsibility.

Teaching the Literature of Ethics - Abu Aardvark is putting out an APB on behalf of "a friend":

I'm going to be teaching a short course at my college next winter called "Comic Book Politics." The idea is to have the students read the best comics published since the mid 1980s which raise - either directly or indirectly - challenging political issues. I define this pretty broadly - anything from The Authority as a way of discussing the ethics of intervention to Maus as a route for discussing the Holocaust. I can't do things not collected into trades - just too hard to get enough copies to 15-20 students otherwise. So here's the problem: I only got back into comics over the last year after not reading them for a decade or so. I've been doing my best to catch up, but I'm sure that there are great authors, series, or TPB's that I've missed or else haven't fully appreciated. Here's a tentative list of what I want to include: Cerebus (High Society, Church and State, maybe Mothers and Daughters); The Authority (Ellis, maybe Millar versions); Transmetropolitan (Ellis); Watchmen and V for Vendetta (Moore); Dark Knight Returns (Miller); Palestine (Sacco); Maus (Spiegelman); Kingdom Come (Waid/Ross); Uncle Sam (Ross). So, oh comics blogosphere: tell me what you think I should include in the syllabus, and why. Thanks!!

Send your suggested additions and I'll round them up. For that matter, explain why you want to knock something off the list. (e.g. The Authority is icky!) This will be an opportunity for one of those mixed comics-and-politics mailbags we so enjoy.

Isn't It Ironic? - Can't decide if the following report is real irony or Alanis Morrisette irony, but the saliva of vampire bats may be the key to longer life for humans.

Think of them as livestock, people. They are our cattle!

Out of the Chaos There Shall Come . . . A Comics Blogger - Friday, Tim O'Neil of The Hurting avowed that "from now on I'm going to strive every day to use this meager podium to build on the high standard 'Journalista!' has already established," and this morning, he's already on the case. Go, man, go!

One thing, though, Tim. Dirk took weekends off, yes. That doesn't mean it's okay for you to do it.

(Via ADDblog.)

But I Wasn't Done with the Last One Yet - Tacitus has a response to my responses to his response to my response to his original item, back there somewhere. You can read it now, though I had a couple of more things I wanted to say about his initial response [to etc.] first. Unfortunately the casual pace of my work has caused Tacitus to assume that "Henley focuses his energy exclusively on the Hezbollah example; I assume this constitutes an implicit concession of my points on Hamas and Lashkar." Actually, I reject his Hamas case, but find his Lashkar argument, at first blush, pretty persuasive - much the most persuasive of his three examples. More on that later. And probably more on the long, blustery section at the end where Tac indignantly lists a bunch of things I would not, in fact, have had the United States do for the most part, most of which were things that, in the event, the United States didn't do.

At that point we're getting into basic principles that are probably worth going into some detail about, one more time, and we will, but what appears to be happening is that Tacitus is basing his morality on the "wouldn't it be nice if" level of discussion, where I'm at "yeah, but how would that work out in practice."

Weakly Fitness Blog Postponement - Had to work at the day job tonight. Sad. In consequence, this week's fitness blog item will be delayed until tomorrow evening. Tune in for all sorts of stuff about Robert Atkins, post-mortem, plus whatever else.

On the Other Hand - The guerrillas may not be able or motivated to stop gradual improvement in Iraq's power-generation infrastructure, but Juan Cole suggests the recent attacks in Fallujah may indicate growing sophistication on the part of the guerrillas:

My colleague, military historian and former Green Beret Tom Collier referred to it as "Phase II, Guerrilla War." This kind of operation is beyond the ambushes, sniping and grenade and bomb attacks we have been seeing, he says.

That's if reports that forty-plus guerrillas took part in coordinated attacks on the Fallujah police station (freeing 22 prisoners) and a Civil Defense Corps position are accurate. The last report of such large-scale guerrilla action, in Samarra in November, was almost certainly spurious. If you were the Fallujah police - not exactly a zealous pro-American fighting force - and you lay down and let a handful of guerrillas walk off with their buddies, you might exaggerate the numbers of the attackers. I'm not sure that's how it went. Nor am I sure which would be worse news for us: either our enemies are getting better at what they do or our allies are a hollow shell. Take your pick.

UPDATE: If they've got the 25 bodies from yesterday's attack claimed in this report, that would tend to bear out the official version of events.

Metric System Update - As you know, every couple of weeks, this site delves into the Daily Power Production and Distribution statistics for Iraq as posted by the Coalition Provisional Authority. I got into this because, back in November, the government was claiming more than the actual statistics showed. Interestingly, now that they've stopped claiming, the numbers actually look much better. Peak daily output for Iraq as a whole is back up to October levels

1-Feb 4116
2-Feb 4126
3-Feb 4103
4-Feb 4090
5-Feb 4000
6-Feb 3919
7-Feb 3883
8-Feb 3934
9-Feb 3951
10-Feb 3992
11-Feb 4034

Those are the rolling seven-day averages for this month and are equivalent to the October figures that were the CPA's previous power-production salad days. The total output numbers are even better - significantly above what the CPA and Iraqi Ministry of Electricity managed in October.

1-Feb 88426
2-Feb 89326
3-Feb 89230
4-Feb 89456
5-Feb 89356
6-Feb 87923
7-Feb 87151
8-Feb 87431
9-Feb 88173
10-Feb 89187
11-Feb 89683

Again, rolling seven-day averages. As for Baghdad itself, the peak output numbers are encouraging:

1-Feb 1388
2-Feb 1398
3-Feb 1376
4-Feb 1365
5-Feb 1367
6-Feb 1341
7-Feb 1327
8-Feb 1406
9-Feb 1402
10-Feb 1416
11-Feb 1437

This is the best stretch of rolling seven-day averages that Baghdad has achieved since the CPA began making figures available (August 2003).

Based on rough calculations from December of Iraq's power needs, the current levels are about half of what would be sufficient for Iraq as an ongoing concern. But it does mean that sabotage and socialism are failing to prevent measurable improvement in the power situation.

Exporting Democracy - Everybody complains that you can't get translations of Thomas Jefferson in Arabic. Juan Cole does something about it. You can help.

Quote of the Day comes from Glenn Reynolds:

This also suggests that the Chinese are, well, dumb as rocks. Arming an unstable nation with whom one shares a border with nuclear weapons just seems awfully stupid to me.

O Bitter Victory - Dang! My top referrer for January got himself promoted out of his blogging job. Dirk, Dirk - what about my traffic stats? Huh?

But seriously, folks. This is excellent news for the Comics Journal, a wonderfully appropriate reward for Dirk Deppey, and a very very big problem for the comics blogosphere. Because Journalista, now on hiatus, was indisputably the center of same, the still point of that turning and ever-growing world. It will not be easily replaced, even with handy instructions. Dirk was simply the Glenn Reynolds (in the best sense) of comics blogging. For reasons Sean T. Collins pointed out weeks ago, he is precisely the person the Journal needs running it now, and he promises to try to return to the weblog as soon as he can (my guess would be it happens sooner than his three-month timetable), but, well, dang.

One possibility, not discussed by Dirk, is that he bring on a substitute Journalista. Granted, guest-blogging is so 2003, but this could work. So let's look at the candidates:

Me - Don't be stupid. I'm a comics blogging dilettante and that wouldn't change. Suitability: Poor.

Eve - Okay, Eve's a dilettante too, but she needn't be - she's a freelance writer, after all, and a modest stipend might be enough to justify the work for her. And who better to replace a queer conservative comics blogger than another queer conservative comics blogger? Suitability: TBD (Fair to Excellent).

Doane - Okay, my links would go down, because he hates me. But we're talking about the health of a medium here, and that's more important. ADD has a lot of energy and has introduced genuine innovations into his own blog like his "5 Questions" series. May be one of those people less inclined to go beyond his own enthusiasms than an institution like Journalista requires. Suitability: Good to Very Good.

Sean - Hey, the man needs a job! And he probably approximates the Deppeyian temperament better than most other candidates. His interview series shows him capable of closing the gap between hobby blogging and professional blogging, and while he has traditionally been more of a think-blogger than a link-blogger, his comics-and-match series shows him capable of the latter. Suitability: Excellent.

Graeme MacMillan - The proprietor of Fanboy Rampage has already shown he meets the bottom-line requirement for the Journalista blogger: he produces massive amounts of content on a daily basis. Has a tendency to use Snark as a shield, though, and some of the humor of his site depends on a sense that "of course we all recognize that this quote is ridiculous." But that's just what he's into now. No reason to think he can't take a different approach when called upon. Suitability: Good to Excellent.

Johanna Draper Carlson - Okay, she's not even a blogger, but she's been following comics longer, more deeply and more widely than most of us. In some ways, running Journalista would simply be an expansion of her existing newsfeed and Snarky Comments features. She's familiar enough with the industry to have important thoughts on the business aspects that have featured prominently in Journalista's content - if she wants to share them. Suitability: Good to Excellent.

Dave Intermittent - Great writer, but the adopted surname tells you what you need to know. Suitability: At best, slightly better than me.

Peiratikos - Come on, there's two of them. How am I supposed to know which one to recommend? Mostly think-bloggers anyway - superb at that, but not what is called for. Suitability: Unproven.

Forager 23 - Excellent culture blogger, and the job would keep him off politics, so there's a bonus to it. More of a think-blogger than a link-blogger, and often goes days-to-weeks without posting. Suitability: Hire him to write articles for the Journal instead.

Neilalien - The original comics link-blogger. In some ways, the only obvious candidate. Would he be willing to pick up the posting pace over his own site's every couple or few days? Does his meatspace life even afford him that time? Dunno. Suitability: No better choice if he wanted the job.

Franklin Harris - The man is a professional journalist and covers an allied beat. May be a bit anti-artcomics for the Comics Journal crowd. Suitability: Excellent.

Son of Crock Files - My contention that the "Zarqawi memorandum" likely constituted somebody's black op takes a hit today from Juan Cole, who doubts Zarqawi's authorship but nevertheless writes

I can, however, confirm that it was written by a radical Sunni Muslim, who hates Shiites and wants to fight the Coalition troops in Iraq in the most effective way. I did not see any false notes in it that might suggest it is a fraud.

Chance that I will end up eating my words on the authenticity of the memo, if not its claimed authorship: increasing.

Man Bites Dog - Worthwhile Charles Krauthammer column about terrorism. (No, you have not logged onto the wrong blog by mistake. I, Jim Henley, wrote that last sentence.) Krauthammer tackles what I've come to think of as the "Gene Healy Question" - why hasn't al Qaeda done anything in the way of further attacks on American soil. Krauthammer allows that

It is easy to understand why nobody wants to talk about this. The administration dare not take credit for what is on the face of it an amazing phenomenon, but one that can reverse itself in a flash. And the opposition hardly wants to highlight a development that might shed favorable light on this administration's post-9/11 stewardship.

Even commentators are uneasy about bringing it up. Any analysis could instantaneously turn into embarrassment.

Nonetheless, it seems odd to have a moratorium on so intriguing a question. I ask it of almost every intelligence expert I meet. Their speculations fall along two lines.

The first line is that the al Qaeda part of the war on terror has been spectacularly successful, that "al Qaeda has been so severely degraded and disrupted that it simply cannot do it." Krauthammer finds this wanting:

But I remain puzzled. Let's say that al Qaeda is so badly hurt that it cannot organize another Sept. 11 with 19 hijackers, four planes and years of training. But how much training, how much planning can it take to pack a few truck bombs and blow them up in a bunch of crowded shopping malls? Considering the economic and psychological havoc that would wreak, why haven't they done it?

Which brings us to line of speculation number two, which I have not encountered before:

Part of the appeal of al Qaeda -- what it uses to recruit people and funds -- is its mystique. Superhuman feats, brilliant execution, masterful planning. That aura feeds its ideology of historical inevitability, that ultimately it will prevail over Western decadence, because the seeming high-tech West lacks the diabolical and methodical will that Islamism brings to the war.

In other words, launching Intifada-style attacks inside the United States would compromise al Qaeda's brand identity.

This is intriguing, and I'm immediately adding it to the Healy Theory that there are just a lot fewer committed anti-American terrorists than we think there are on the list of plausible explanations. Which is more plausible? I'm sticking with Gene for now. After all, "al Qaeda" is, as we keep hearing, a pretty amorphous thing. I saw someone describe it this week as a kind of venture capital firm for Islamist militants. Since car bombs, dynamite belts and sniper rifles are so cheap, terrorists who wanted to unleash such attacks in the US wouldn't even need to approach al Qaeda for funding and approval - they could just do it.

Elsewhere in the article Krauthammer is inclined to give the administration credit for pretty much everything the Administration has done in the name of anti-terror policy, which is pretty much his "first line of speculation" on steroids. Even if explanation one (We kicked al Qaeda ass!) obtains, that doesn't mean everything the government has done since September 11, 2001 is wise or just, merely that the net effect, applied to whatever level of future threat existed, has been positive. So far. As Krauthammer notes of any available explanation, "It could prove catastrophically wrong tomorrow."

Outrage of the Week - Someone from the Toronto Star sent a hassling e-mail to blogger Damian Penny. Penny had done a critique-by-excerpt of a Star column by Thomas Walkom, using boldface to highlight the passages he considered especially outrageous. The Star representative accused Penny of violating the paper's copyright.

Granted that Penny's original item was light on analysis or even invective, and the excerpts are large. The bulk of the item is text taken directly from the Star. However, it's clear that in the context of internet writing that Penny's use of boldface as criticism constitutes original expression on Penny's part - it's a value-add, as it were. And as Penny notes, he appears to be in compliance with the Canadian copyright provisions on "fair dealing."

So, petty, groundless harrassment by some functionary is what we're dealing with here. Boo to the Star.

(Via Flit.)

Scandal Update - There are now two people who have told reporters they remember seeing Lieutenant Bush at the headquarters of the 187th Tactical Recon Group in Montgomery, AL - Joe LeFevers (scroll to bottom of article) and Lt. Col. John "Bill" Calhoun. The Boston Globe quotes someone who was supposed to be a supporting witness of the chief accuser of the "record cleanup" aspect of the scandal as contradicting said accuser's version of events.

Meanwhile on the John Kerry front, we have a name for the alleged object of his affection (Alex Polier), an age (24 now), and a date range (four years ago, when Polier was 20). Warning: British press! The young woman's parents seem to confirm that they perceived an interest on Kerry's part in their daughter, but it's unclear if things ever developed into full-blown hanky-pankey - perhaps because of the vigilance of Mom and Dad. See the virtues of heterosexual marriage for child rearing? (Though if true, the story is at best win-some, lose-some , heterosexual marriagewise.) Or, you know, maybe the Poliers imagined the icky aspects of Kerry's interest in their daughter.

Meanwhile, in the American Prospect ("Left of the New Republic, Right of the Nation"), Murray S. Waas reports that "Two government officials have told the FBI that conservative columnist Robert Novak was asked specifically not to publish the name of undercover CIA operative Valerie Plame in his now-famous July 14 newspaper column. The two officials told investigators they warned Novak that by naming Plame he might potentially jeopardize her ability to engage in covert work, stymie ongoing intelligence operations, and jeopardize sensitive overseas sources."

What is by no means clear is that the "two government officials" are the "two White House officials" originally reported as the leakers, lo these months ago. I'm assuming not, based on the way reporters use terms-of-art phrases like "government official" and "senior administration official" and such. (Hey, there's an idea for a useful web page: a glossary of terms that explains which formulation means what.)

Is the Prospect story really about trying to shift as much blame as possible to Robert Novak? If it worked there would be dry eyes across the political spectrum. Will it work? That's complicated.

Getting the Memo - The Coalition Provisional Authority has what it calls "Text from Abu Mus'ab al-Zarqawi Letter" online. It's an interesting if curious document: six numbered sections, no preamble, light on the "God willings" compared to comparable documents I've seen. The Arabic version seems to have more of the apparatus of a letter about it, judging from the shape of the text on the page. Presumably the English-language version comprises excerpts. I think I have the odd reader who understands Arabic, and I would be keen to receive any insights they care to provide on the Arabic text and how it compares with the English translation.

Going by the English translation, the author is a man of diverse views, mostly about the same topic. We go from

Praised be to Allah, however, with relentless effort and searching we have acquired some places and their numbers are increasing, to become base points for the brothers who will spark war and bring the people of this country into a real battle with god's will.

to

There is no doubt that our field of movement is shrinking and the grip around the throat of the Mujahidin has begun to tighten. With the spread of the army and police, our future is becoming frightening.

and

As we get closer to the decisive moment, we feel that our entity is spreading within the security void existing in Iraq, something that will allow us to secure bases on the ground, these bases that will be the jump start of a serious revival, god willing.

Note: Christopher Dickey, in Newsweek, writes that, having read the Arabic version, he finds the language and subject matter plausibly authentic. He also calls the English translation "politically correct excerpts, which left out the first nine of 17 pages." He reports that

But as an American here in Iraq, I don't find the letter much consolation.

The writer, sinister idealist that he is, complains that too many of the home-grown fighters in Iraq are reluctant to be suicidal martyrs. Instead, he says, these Iraqis lay landmines, launch missiles, fire mortars and then go home to their wives and kids. He doesn't really want to have anything to do with them, nor they with him.

Unfortunately for us, these are the guys, precisely, who are attacking American forces every hour, killing an American every day, and costing us a billion a week. And so far, there's no sign at all that they're giving up.

Developing.

UPDATE: Yeah, this was one of those type-as-you-research items. Q: Am I admitting error in calling the Zarqawi Memorandum a probable fake? A: Not yet. If it hasn't been convincingly deprecated by the Ides of March, I'll be all like mea culpa already. Until then, two words: mobile labs.

Defenders of Civil (mumble) - Jesse Walker had a good article on Reason's site this week about the muted response of some "civil liberties" groups to the FCC's sudden interest in cracking down on indecency (which predates and transcends the Super Bowl controversy). Well how come?

Meanwhile, many defenders of free speech have backed themselves into a corner. Last year's movement against media consolidation was an uncomfortable alliance between people who wanted to expand the available range of expression and people more eager to eliminate expression they dislike. The anti-consolidationists' strongest ally within the FCC was Michael Copps, and it'' no secret which category he fits. Many of the movement's self-described civil libertarians are being awfully quiet about Copps' efforts to suppress speech - perhaps because they don't want to break with the commissioner, perhaps because they've gotten into the habit of looking to the FCC to manage the nation's airwaves, or perhaps because the biggest forfeitures are falling on Clear Channel, the largest and most hated of the radio chains.

They're making a mistake. You needn't like Clear Channel to recognize that an FCC which revokes licenses and imposes draconian fines isn't going to refrain from penalizing college stations and low-power broadcasters. One of the opening shots in the new war on indecency was the $7,000 fine imposed on the Oregon community station KBOO in 2001. Its crime: playing a feminist rap called "Your Revolution," which mocked the check-out-all-my-bitches school of hip hop in terms that were sometimes a little profane themselves. In that case the fine was eventually rescinded, but that's hardly a reason to sleep easy - it took the FCC two years to reverse itself, and still it declared that it was a "very close case." And this was David "It's OK To Say 'Fucking'" Solomon of the Enforcement Bureau speaking, not the more politically attuned appointees atop the commission.

Will liberal free expression watchdog groups allow anti-corporate bias to trump their declared mission?

Another Tac - Continuing to probe the Tacitus business, I'm finding that there are reasonable grounds for suspecting Hezbollah culpability in the Khobar Towers bombing of 1996, which certainly post-dates the Proxy War. The US secured indictments against, among other suspects, two Iranian intelligence officers fingered by the suspects the Saudis arrested. Complicating factors: the suspects were "interrogated" by Saudi authorities before confessing their affiliation and sponsorship; some observers ascribe culpability for Khobar Towers to al Qaeda rather than Hezbollah; the Saudi establishment of 1996 would be highly motivated to lay blame elsewhere than al Qaeda.

Of course, if it was both Hezbollah and al Qaeda the "Tacitus thesis" would strengthen accordingly. If it was Hezbollah alone, that is still more recent violent hostility from Hezbollah than I have credited. If it was just al Qaeda, my critique is undimmed.

Interestingly, the Defense Department's formulation has Bin Laden "Praising the 1996 terrorist attack on the U.S. Air Force barracks in Khobar Towers, Dhahran, Saudi Arabia" rather than carrying it out.

On the subject of unimpeachable sources, one DEBKAfile article I found ascribes the Khobar bombing to al Qaeda, while another not only pins it on Iran/Hezbollah, but claims that the Saudis extracted an "Okay, I promise never to do it again" from Iran afterward, based on information they "did not share with the United States." (The same article alleges that the Iranians almost openly bragged of breaking that promise with the Saudi bombings of last May.) That article has al Qaeda working on behalf of Iran.

SITUATION UNCLEAR, TRY AGAIN LATER is what it all adds up to.

Tac Two - Continuing my piecemeal response to Tacitus' desire that the United States war on every group out there that professes belief in "jihad" whether that group has, like al Qaeda, attacked the United States or not.

Henley's implicit contention that the only violence against Americans we should hold against it is post-1983 violence makes no sense. Is there a statute of limitations on such things? Will we forgive al Qaeda in 2021? Prior to 9/11, Hezbollah held the record for most Americans slaughtered by terrorists in a single blow, which ought to count for something for those with memories of average capacity.

We might call this "Zimmerman Telegram logic." Recall that Germany wanted Mexico to burn with martial indignation about losing the Mexican War 70 years later.

No, I don't want to re-fight the Lebanese Proxy War of the early 1980s. Nor do I want to sail back to Indochina and teach those Vietnamese Communist bastards a lesson. Had Hezbollah continued an active campaign against US targets I would say differently. They haven't, judging by the examples Tacitus gives of their post-Beirut activity - Hamas symps running a cigarette-smuggling ring out of the Carolinas and Hamas terrorists bombing two Israeli targets in Argentina 10 and 12 years ago.

"Forgiveness" doesn't enter into it, and the comparison with al Qaeda is, like most of the analogies Tacitus has reached for in this discussion, inapposite. Al Qaeda attacked American civilian targets in our country, and have made clear they intend to do so again when they get a chance. Hezbollah attacked American military and government targets in their country, and ceased to do so after our withdrawal. Am I saying it doesn't bother me that Hezbollah killed American troops, diplomats and spies? No, I am not. I am saying that our actual response - immediate retaliation and withdrawal from a situation where we could do no further practical good - was the right one, and closes the matter. That is not a more radical or less patriotic position than that taken by the Reagan, Bush I, Clinton and - so far - Bush II administrations, because it's the same position.

As a general matter, Tacitus is right about one thing in this discussion - there is a collection of groups out there that share aspects of an ideology. Some of these groups are declared enemies of the US and have actively set out to war on it. Others have not. The dumbest thing in the world is to act to unite your potential enemies rather than divide them. That's the heart of my disagreement with the Tacitus Program.

Why the Kerry Story Matters - Not to me. Near as I can tell, Kerry hasn't a) perjured himself, and b) tried to use the entire machinery of government to ruin a young woman's life. So I say live and let live. I mean, it matters to Kerry.

Hold That Thought - Tacitus has a response to my critique of the other day. I'm too tired to respond in detail right now, but rest assured I still think he's wrong. More anon, but his Kitty Genovese analogy at the end is overheated and as wrong as his original "like going after the SS and leaving the Wehrmacht alone" simile. Israel and India are neither so helpless nor so innocent as Genovese; nor is Tacitus arguing simply that we should "call the cops" - he's demanding that we be the cops.

Bimbo Eruption - Hey, I don't know if you've read anything about this or not but apparently there are rumors about - oh. You have.

Well you see I had to work late.

Anyway, one of the great things about practical politics is it offers so many no-lose propositions for the libertarian psyche. Either Kerry is an examplar of the hypocrisy, recklessness and arrogance of power, OR his enemies prove just how much venality and viciousness exists in the world of "public service."

Now there's been a lot of irresponsible speculation and theorizing about the fragmentary details, and I'm disappointed. That you started without me. So, here's a Grand Unified Conspiracy Theory for you.

Republican-inclined bloggers are saying, It's gotta come from the Chris Lehane/Wesley Clark/Clintons axis. Democrats say No, it's obviously the Republicans. And if it was the Lehane/Clark team at the behest of Bill and Hillary, then why would Clark have dropped out of the race and why would he be flying out tomorrow to formally endorse John Kerry for President.

Easy! Clark and Lehane put the rumor out there at the behest of Kerry. Because the rumor is a crock, and when it is so proved, it will innoculate Kerry against scandal for the rest of the campaign.

Remember, when this turns out to be true, I'll be asking you to pretend I wasn't kidding when I said it. Should it turn out to be as baseless as all the other theories floating around today (squared), I'll thank you to remember that I wasn't really serious.

Snakehandling - I was kidding Julian Sanchez in e-mail for boldly redefining libertarianism as support for tax increases in his article for Reason Online yesterday. Actually, his proposal is that

Perhaps, then, it is time for proponents of smaller government to let themselves be inspired by Urban's wonky lovefest and offer a compromise to the other side: We'll accept the rollback of the Bush tax cuts if you join the fight on the spending side.

He has his reasons:

In a world where legislators felt obligated to keep outlays connected by some tenuous thread to revenues, tax cuts would entail smaller government. But we don't live in that world: Absent that condition, tax cuts aren't the same as smaller government. Smaller government is smaller government. If fiscal conservatives want to have any credibility with moderates and liberals when they insist that federal spending on education or healthcare be rolled back in the name of responsibility to future taxpayers, we're going to have to begin acknowledging that fact.

I see where he's coming from. But at the very least, let's be clear what's worth a grand compromise and what isn't. Actual elimination of programs is. Spending caps, budget "reductions," and other gimmicks are not. As we've seen, if you hack back a federal program but leave it alive, it will bide its time and return, stronger and richer than ever.

I've come to reject the alleged grand strategy of starving government by stealth, which was what a lot of both liberals and conservatives imagined to be the real aim of the Bush tax cut package. If I oppose dragging the country into a national security strategy by misdirection, how can I support the same approach to fiscal matters? But if we're going to agree to a distinction between tax cuts and smaller government, and give up the former, we need to make damn sure we get the latter. I'd be eager for Julian to develop his strategy for doing so further than in this initial proposal.

We Were Winter Soldiers Once, And Young - Diana Moon has two letters from veterans about John Kerry home from Vietnam.

Memo to self: schedule series of Kerry criticism posts for next week. Don't want to go getting all sappy.

Crock Files? - Billmon explains his own suspicions about the alleged "Zarqawi memorandum." Interestingly, Donald Rumsfeld is distancing himself from the question of the memo's authenticity. That may be a "once bitten, twice shy" thing, to which one can only say, it's about time. The same VOA article reports that

General Richard Myers, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, says he has seen a translation of the document, allegedly written by a terrorist linked to al-Qaida named Abu Musab Zarqawi.

He says the question of its legitimacy is still undergoing study. "Authenticity is still being evaluated," he said.

Shall this too pass? In Billmon's own content, he notes that NYT columnist William Safire offers an account of the memo's provenance that directly contradicts the original NYT reporting on the subject - specifically on the first report's assertion that it "did not pass through Iraqi groups that American intelligence officials have said in the past may have provided unreliable information." This isn't dispositive either, since Safire has compiled a record of inaccuracy, misdirection and fantasia in his Iraq reporting to scare any sane reader off making too much of what he says.

So, as they say, developing. I'm sticking with my prediction that the memo as reported will prove bogus, but I'm not declaring victory.

The Latest from Iraq - Tachyon transmissions from the future of the Iraqi reconstruction have arrived in present-day Haiti. Might be from one of those alternate futures one hears about. Here's hoping. Memo to our hawkish friends: I'm not on "the left" and yes, I opposed Clinton's Haiti intervention at the time.

Smear the Queer - If "the culture of fear" doesn't work, there's always "the culture of flouting federalism in the name of atavistic revulsion."

King of Slightly More Media - What I like to think of as my first piece for Reason, on the tragedy of having a good man running the National Endowment for the Arts, is online now. ("Abandoned libertarianism??" Fie, I say! You can have my libertarianism when you pry it from my cold, dead utility maximizer.)

And last week's Official NFL apology got linked from an online erotic toy store. Cool! Gonna have to devote more blog time to boob socks to keep the new readers happy.

It's Not Just a Violation of Godwin's Law, It's a Bad Idea - Prologue: The other day, Matthew Yglesias wrote

Bush and I are looking at the same Saddam Hussein, but he sees a threat to the United States where I do not. If, however, you accept both the Bush Doctrine (there's no difference between a terrorist and a helper of terrorists) and the AIPAC Doctrine (anti-Israeli terrorism is continuous with anti-American terrorism and both are, at root, independent of US and Israeli policy decisions) then attacking Saddam Hussein really does seem like an element in the War on Terror.

Main Event: In a not obviously related item yesterday, Tacitus wrote

There is a continuity and a universality to jihad. Jihadist groups and players interlock and interchange; they share the same enemies; and broadly the same goals. One will sometimes hear that the United States is fighting (or ought to fight) al Qaeda alone. Lashkar, Hamas, Hizbullah: these are not our problems. This contention is utterly wrong: it is the logical equivalent of confronting the SS but not the Wehrmacht.

Speaking of utterly wrong, that's a fair characterization of Tac's analogy. The SS and the Wehrmacht were part of the same unified national command structure. Hamas, Hezbollah, al Qaeda, the Chechnyan resistance, even after our best efforts at pushing them together, are not. A more precise analogy would be: Focusing on al Qaeda is the logical equivalent of confronting Nazi Germany but not Spain or even, after Pilsudski shut down parliament, confronting Nazi Germany but not Poland. Hey, our enemy was "totalitarianism," remember? And hawks are always telling us that we needed to act sooner in the thirties, relying on the evidence then in hand.

Hezbollah has avoided attacking US targets since the Late Unpleasantness in Lebanon. To my knowledge, Hamas has avoided targetting the US entirely. Lashkar e Taiba is focused on a conflict of zero interest to Americans. A certain level of cooperation against these groups at the law enforcement level makes sense, for Neutrality Act reasons if nothing else. I suspect Ismail Royer was telling the truth that his band of jihad enthusiasts intended to fight India only. But we shut down Fenian attacks from US territory into Canada in the 1860s and the same principle obtains: don't borrow trouble. Similarly, we shouldn't allow US soil to be used to plan attacks on Israel. That kind of mutual cooperation makes perfect sense, and leaves the primary responsibility where it belongs - the US is more responsible for dealing with al Qaeda than Israel is; Israel is more responsible for dealing with Hamas than we are; India more responsible for handling the issue of Kashmir than either Israel or the US.

But that's a far cry from making it America's business to solve Israel or India's security problems for them. Realism also plays a role. We only have so many troops and intelligence assets to go around, and only so much diplomatic capital. The same is true for India and Israel. For instance, India has begged off involving itself more deeply in Iraq because of its problems with Pakistan and Kashmir. We have to respect that. Similarly, we need a level of cooperation with Pakistan that India doesn't, because of al Qaeda. If too eagerly taking sides against Lashkar e Taiba pushes Pakistan completely to the other side, then we've failed our primary duty to our own security.

UPDATE: BruceR of Flit points out that the Fenian attacks were in the 1860s, not the 1840s, as I originally wrote. This is what comes of working from the memory of a high school diplomatic history course, gone lo these five years and, uh, more.

Patience, My Little One - Yes, it'll be a busy Fitness Blogging Sunday, all right.

Comics Blogwatch Addendum - How did I miss alerting you to the Dark Knight blogging on Peiratikos? Is it because I suck? Maybe. Read

Batman: "He was too big..."
Batman: "You let them do it. I always knew you would."
"The Commissioner is an excellent cop - but, I think, a poor judge of character."

More is promised, so keep checking.

Well, Crap - Fragmentary reports are that John Kerry has accused the Republican Party under George Bush of spreading a "culture of fear." And it turns out he's been saying it since January.

Crap. I may not be able to maintain my traditional aloofness between the two major hopefuls. Because this is the overriding issue facing the country right now: will we live bravely again or will we forever shiver in post-traumatic stress from our Very Bad Day two and a half years ago? And as I've said over and over, what's despicable about the Bush Administration is that it wants us to wallow in perpetual, low-grade panic. That is what I can't forgive.

Which brings us to Kerry. It was already vital that the Bush Administration utterly reform or go. But a major Presidential candidate running a forthright campaign against fearmongering would have incalculable value. It would make up for everything I am fated to dislike - even hate - about John Kerry. It is the whole ball of wax. It is the national soul. It trumps fiscal policy, regulatory policy, even the particulars of how any particular politician did or did not vote on the use-of-force resolution in late 2002 or the PATRIOT Act before that. Because let the country recover its courage, and these other matters can be mastered. Keep the country in terror and we are doomed on all fronts.

Here are some words David Brooks put in the mouth of President Bush today:

President Bush: Tim, I know I'm repeating myself, but I am a war president. Do you remember how you felt on Sept. 12, 2001? Do you remember the incredible sense of shock, sadness, anger and pride, all welling up into a consuming sense of urgency? That's how I still feel every day.

To which must be appended:

Because I am a sniveling coward.

I'm talking more about Brooks here than about the President, but also everyone who read Brooks and was stirred. If you still feel "every day" the way you felt on September 12, 2001, and you did not personally lose a loved one to the savages, there is something wrong with you. Snap out of it. You are indulging yourself and it is unseemly.

We need not be that nation. Every possible parsing of the preceding sentence applies.

Will Kerry do it? Will "culture of fear" somehow expand to cover tax cuts and social security privatization and every other Republican policy Democrats don't like? Or will his campaign wield it with responsibility and focus? The man's a politician, so there's little enough cause for hope. But there's a chance. I can hardly believe it but there's a chance.

Comics Blogwatch - Johnny Bacardi is back with tons of good stuff. Just keep reading.

Shawn Fumo has the demographics that Shonen Jump gives its advertisers. On the downside, its circulation about matches Batman: Hush. On the upside, most of the readers are people who have no idea what Batman: Hush is. (And are thus luckier by far than yr corrspndnt.)

Meanwhile, Kevin Melrose reports estimated dollar sales for manga in the US at - cue Dr. Evil voice - 100 meelion dollars. So that's 10 million books, roughly. The 80/20 rule tells us that one fifth of the audience bought 8 million of them - call the one fifth "Okatu." If you knew how many books the average Otaku bought last year (10? 20? 40?) you would have, at the Fermi number level, everything you needed to estimate the total audience. If someone wants to offer an informed guess on the Annual Otaku Purchase Rate (AOPR), please do so. ("Informed" could simply be, my manga-reading friends and I each bought about X.) 20 seems entirely reasonable - that's less than two books a month. I'm reluctant to estimate 40 without expert urging.

My instinct is that the total audience falls somewhere between 500,000 and two million. I'm inclined to think that it's at least a million as of the end of the year. Certain correspondents will be aware that my mid-year estimates were lower. 100% growth is 100% growth, and that's what Publisher's Weekly (via Kevin Melrose) is reporting.

Laura Tegan Gjovaag and Alan David Doane have new reviews. Usefully, they are reviewing different books. Laura is also in the grip of Immediate Post-Blankets Enthusiasm, which has claimed so many bright young minds. There oughta be a law.

This just in: Dave Fiore thinks that superhero comics have a lot to do with Transcendentalism. I've figured out one particular thing he's been saying that bothers me though. I realize there's a lot of controversy about the relative contributions of Stan Lee versus Jack Kirby on the one hand and Steve Ditko on the other. Dave takes this to the extreme of suggesting, usually tacitly, that Ditko was essentially the author of Spider-man and Doctor Strange, while Kirby was the author of the Fantastic Four, Hulk and Thor. He seems to base this on the undeniable difference in sensibilities between the two titles.

This strikes me as dicey. To quote a member in good standing of Dave's beloved American Renaissance, "I am large. I contain multitudes." The fact that Whitman was basically wrong about himself - far as I'm concerned, any two pages of Leaves of Grass will pretty much resemble each other - doesn't mean he wasn't right about others. Some authors obsessively pursue a handful of themes. Others range widely among tones, subjects and approaches. This is especially true of early-midcentury American commercial writers, and whatever else Lee was, he was one of those.

Mark Evanier is the man to memorialize longtime DC editor Julius Schwartz, who passed away over the weekend.

Bruce Baugh is right about the early Silver Age Marvels - I know from the three-to-a-package bargain comic assortments you could get in country stores in those days. There was a certain continuity between the end of Marvel's monster era and the beginning of its superhero phase. No doubt Stan Lee obsessively pursuing his themes.

The Zarqawi Memorandum - With some hesitation, I'm calling bullshit on the alleged memo from Abu Musab al-Zarqawi or someone like him to "senior leaders of Al Qaeda" reported yesterday in the New York Times.

Daniel Drezner explains persuasively why the contents of the memo are such good news about the security situation. I'd go beyond that: the memo is not just good news about the security situation but about the whole "grand strategy" for Iraq (to the extent there still is one). This is the biggest problem: the memo is too good to be true. The voice of an avowed enemy of the United States validates the US's every talking point. Summary: We are losing. We need to kill Shi'ites to stir up trouble. We already have killed Shiites to stir up trouble. The Americans are too resolute to ever leave. The new Iraqi defense forces will spell the end for us. Once the handover to a democratic government is complete, we're well and truly fucked.

If you made a list of things you hoped to hear out of the mouths of an Islamist radical in Iraq, you'd be hard-pressed to come up with anything that didn't appear in the memo.

That leaves three possibilities: we're on the verge of a smashing success; the memo is genuine but blinkered, all the sectarian problems of apportioning power among Kurd, Shiite and Sunni still loom outside the scope of the author's concerns; the memo is a fake. The temptation is surely to say I'm plumping for the last because the idea of good news from Iraq just kills me. That's the sort of thing I can't disprove. But I'm really saying two patterns continue to obtain: 1) intelligence coups and political breakthroughs that dissolve on inspection; 2) the "Zarqawi memo" is eerily of a piece with much other "good news" reporting from Iraq in that "the real good news is in the predictions." That is, "Zarqawi's" worst news (aka our best news) is pending: as soon as the Iraqi police are trained, we're screwed. As soon as "This is the democracy," we're SOL.

If Con Coughlin had fished this one out, I'd be calling it phony without hesitation. As it is, the Times itself has a lot to answer for.

So if it's a fake, whose fake is it? Candidates include, singly or in combination: British Intelligence, US Intelligence, Israeli Intelligence, Jordanian Intelligence (Zarqawi is Jordanian), Pakistani Intelligence (hot rumor is that the letter was on a CD-ROM carried by Pakistani al Qaeda courier Hassan Ghul) and various interested Iraqi parties. (The article is careful to quote an American official saying that the memo did not pass through, well, the INC's hands.) I should state that I don't think the memo was intended primarily as black propaganda against the US or other coalition country audiences. I think its primary audience is the Iraqis themselves, particularly the Shiites: Anything bad that happens to you is the fault of these outside agitators and there's no call to take it out on your domestic rivals. That we are discussing it in these parts is simply textbook blowback.

Then again, I could be wrong.

Modest Proposal - Liberal blogger Zizka suggests that libertarians vote for the Libertarian candidate for President, whoever he turns out to be. He particularly means libs who have voted Republican in the past and are down on the Bush Administration but just. can't. make. themselves. vote. Democratic!

I've been down with this program for some time and have said so, and not just for foreign policy reasons. The impression I've developed, though, is that if you're for the expansive interpretation of the phrase "War on Terror," that trumps everything else. You'll pull the lever for Bush no matter how much you hate his domestic security policies, or his protectionist flirtations, or his runaway spending, or his restrictionism on everything from cloning to gay marriage.

One might suspect that, on some level, that's what the war is for.

You Just Made That Up - Hesiod finds more on the "We were almost all wrong" front in the Times:

A classified "fabrication notification" about the defector, a former Iraqi major, was issued by the D.I.A. to other American intelligence agencies in May 2002, but it was then repeatedly overlooked, three senior intelligence officials said. Intelligence agencies use such notifications to alert other agencies to information they consider unreliable because its source is suspected of making up or embellishing information.

Because the warning went unheeded, the officials said, the defector's claims that Iraq had built mobile research laboratories to produce biological weapons were mistakenly included in, among other findings, the National Intelligence Estimate of October 2002, which concluded that Iraq most likely had significant biological stockpiles."

Hesiod thinks it's the same Iraqi major who shows up in Colin Powell's famous UN presentation:

Finally, a fourth source. An Iraqi major who defected confirmed that Iraq has mobile biological research laboratories in addition to the production facilities I mentioned earlier.

Essential Reading - Michael Lind in the Nation on the neocons. (Via Gene Healy.) Long, detailed and devastating without being merely snarky. The passage demolishing the contention of Brooks that most of the people labelled neocons don't even know each other very well is breathtaking fun.

Gene also has good items on extradimensional traveller Victor David Hanson and the President's interview with Tim Russert.

Jeremy Lott on how archaeology could make markets for cultural treasures work better than the present system, where prohibitionism, the consequent black markets and the tendency of museums to shut artifacts away in storage combine to hamper scholarship and public appreciation alike.

Remember, political bloggers: Journalista is your source for news on freedom of expression issues involving cartoonists here and abroad. You want to know which cartoonist has been arrested in Myanmar or had his strip pulled in Miami? Read Journalista every day. Best of all from your perspective, that kind of news is always toward the top of the daily entry.

Scott Ritter begs to differ about David Kay's "We were all wrong" claim. It's not just a nyah nyah I said it all along article, but a nyah nyah these other people said it all along too article.

Calpundit finds that 1st Lt. George W. Bush was sent to the corner.

Julian Sanchez has a cool Watchmen movie poster from another dimension - perhaps the one where Victor Davis Hanson lives.

Gee Whillickers! - Hosting Matters doesn't just have 24/7 online technical support - it has 24/7 online billing support. They're trying to straighten out the domain registration tangle that may take this site down for a little while, and if they weren't there I'd have lost two extra days. Add that to the reasonable prices and sound infrastructure on the list of reasons to host your blog with them.

UPDATE: If the site suffers downtime, the supplanter e-mail address will go out too. Be warned. And remember, you'll still be able to find Unqualified Offerings at http://medea.hmdnsgroup.com/~clearing/ and the XML feed at http://medea.hmdnsgroup.com/~clearing/index.xml

Weekly Fitness Blog Item - Fitness? Hah! I hibernate and eat. Let' s cut straight to the links, shall we?

Dave Lull tips me to a Steven Milloy article on FoxNews.com, criticizing recent reports of successful high-carb diet routines. Milloy determines, not before congratulating himself for doing so, that the studies cited actually show that the "high-carb" dieters who lost weight were actually eating fewer calories than a low-carb control group - by 400 to 600 calories per day. All well and good, but if the high-carbers were able to achieve satiety on that regimen and stick to it for 12 weeks, that's still something, no? After all, when people complain that all low-carb diets do is create a calorie deficit in the obese, those of us who defend low-carb diets respond, "And your point was - ?" If someone can stick to a diet and lose weight without incurring nutrition-related health problemsm, that diet has some value.

Carb control partisans can take provisional pleasure in this result, though:

After 12 weeks, the study subjects on the control diet weighed the same as when the study started.

That was on 2800 calories a day with no exercise. And they didn't gain a pound.

Milloy works at CATO so we're practically cousins, but this particular article doesn't strike me as necessarily more rigorous than the studies it criticizes.

Neil Steinberg reports on his Week of Eating Dangerously.

Marathon prep this week: Thought about marathon. Dashed through cold to car. Put on heat.

Weight 165, waist 33.5". See you next week.

Technical Bulletin - Probably going to suffer a brief outage Monday and a day or two beyond. Be warned.

UPDATE: Should the outage come, you should be able to reach this site at the following address: http://medea.hmdnsgroup.com/~clearing/

If you bookmark it now you'll be ready for the worst.

Um, you do think this site going down is the worst, right? Right?

Good!

Who Knew - Awhile back, Kevin Drum wondered who, if anyone, argued before Gulf War Phase II that Iraq did not in fact possess Weapons of Some Destruction. Some answers:

BruceR of Flit called Iraq's WSD's "largely illusory I suspect" back in September 2002. As he does not shrink from reminding us.

Australia's chief weapons inspector, who led the 1998 UN team, told Australian troops just before the war that 'Iraq had possessed the remnants of weapons of mass destruction but its ability to use them on the battlefield was "almost zero" ,' according to The Age. Via Hesiod. But inspector Roger Hill says that he warned the troops that ""did they have enough to kill soldiers? Yes." Which explains all the Coalition troops who died from Iraqi chem and bio weapons, I suppose. Via Hesiod, who probably oversells the import of Hill's statements.

Then there was former pre-unperson Scott Ritter, the object of Zizka's consideration in a Seeing the Forest item today.

Peddle to the Mettle - Aaron Haspel has a fantastic item about "influence peddling." Excerpt:

One evening a lobbyist for chemical companies tried to explain his job to me. This man was a moral idiot; the interests of his clients circumscribed his universe. He literally could not distinguish between robbing and being robbed, between, say, supporting a subsidy and opposing a regulation. He was no less instructive for that.

That belief effectively reduces the importance of individuals by saying that they can all be expected to react to certain things in a certain way--it dehumanizes them, just as it dehumanizes all of us. - Brooke Oberwetter has the real story on the breakup of Ben and J-Lo.

Guilty Guilty Guilty - Because somebody has to be the last blogger to link to the latest Plame Game developments.

Quote of the Day comes from avowed conservative Dirk Deppey: "that a socialist believes something is insufficient evidence that it's untrue."

True. I think libertarians might agree with this even more than conservatives. If there's an advantage to having fringe political beliefs, it's that there aren't all that many people around who think like you do. To keep yourself in reading material, you have to spend a fair amount of quality time with authors who don't think like you do. That can be valuable.

Aside to Dirk and Neilalien: Come on, guys. It upsets us children when the parents fight.

Micro-Blogwatch - No time to add value to it this week, but Dave Fiore has the Watchmen-blogging ball now and is running with it. Very much worth your time, even in the parts where he's wrong. Start with the first item and scroll up. I mean, scroll up after you read the first item. Otherwise things won't make any sense at all.

They Have a Word for It - And if they don't, try the Random Word Generator. It's famissible. Your uniseccutor will think so too.

Fanboy Follow-Up - Last week I had harsh words for the final segment of the first issue of DC: The New Frontier. It seems to have caused a bit of a stir, and I may be on my way to getting a reputation as the reviewer who makes Baby Jesus cry, about which I feel conflicted. Anyway, some interesting reactions out there:

Augie De Blieck Jr., who turns out to be a very Calpundit of traffic generation, kindly cites the item and says it changed his mind about the issue. (Scroll down to "Updates and Corrections.")

Someone posted an excerpt from the review to the DC Message Boards, which started a, ahem, lively discussion. The initial thread bred many subsequent ones along the same lines. (See the New Frontier section.)

Most interestingly, Darwyn Cooke himself started a response thread in which he posted the Hal Jordan backstory that justified the action of the story in his mind. (Link via Fanboy Rampage.) DC's boards post the most recent message first, so to read Cooke's own contributions you have to go to the bottom of the last page and work up.

Cooke's explanation is well worth reading, and it leads me to soften my criticism to this extent: he mostly just told the story wrong. Too much of the background needed to be foreground. It's not that, as he said, the story "could have been 1000 pages long" and there just wasn't room for all the justification. The justification needed to be in the book as well as in Cooke's mind. The whole chain of events and intentions still strikes me as low-probability, but within the realm of the conceivable. We just weren't given enough to conceive it.

The important thing, though, is that Cooke seems to recognize that some version of my assertion that "Hal Jordan is a moral coward" is true, and that he intends to develop the issue further in the series. Which means that, on the extremely unlikely chance that my initial item convinced anyone to drop the book, it's worth strongly reconsidering that decision.

Here We Go Again - More germs in envelopes, and for awhile now:

In November, a letter postmarked Chattanooga, Tenn., and addressed to the White House was intercepted at an off-site mail sorting facility in the Washington area, sources told ABCNEWS.

The powdery substance in the letter tested positive for ricin. However, the tests indicated that the poison was in a low-potency, granular form that posed no health risk, the sources said.

According to two law enforcement sources, the intercepted letter addressed to the White House was signed "Fallen Angel."

It's Peter David's Fault!

Apparently our newest bioterrorist is a rogue trucker:

That letter complained about new federal trucking regulations requiring more rest for drivers. The letter described the author as "a fleet owner of a tanker company" and contained this threat: "If my demand is dismissed I'm capable of making Ricin . . . I will start dumping."

Must be a Syrian trucker. Or maybe Iranian. I haven't checked the schedule in awhile.

A Reminder - You can get the news today from Knight-Ridder

The officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue, didn't dispute that the CIA failed to accurately assess the state of Iraq's weapons programs. But they said that the intelligence efforts led by Cheney magnified the errors through exaggeration, oversights and mistaken deductions.

Those efforts bypassed normal channels, used Iraqi exiles and defectors of questionable reliability, and produced findings on former dictator Saddam Hussein's links to al-Qaida and his illicit arms programs that were disputed by analysts at the CIA, the State Department and other agencies, the officials said.

or from Unqualified Offerings last March:

More likely, we're simply witnessing the curruption - perhaps "beat-down" might be a better way of putting it - of the intelligence analysis function by its political masters. In the face of relentless pressure from above, dubious defector reports get upgraded to reliable, dodgy-looking documents get reclassified as authentic. Then it's off to the UN or the Halls of Congress (SOTU, e.g.) with the "evidence."

Official Statement of the NFL - See NFL.Com:

We deeply regret the appalling incident that occurred during halftime celebrations at the Super Bowl yesterday. For 40 years and more our league has been tantalizing our fans with partial views of women's breasts. We have been committed to showing cleavage and, failing that, the outline of women's breasts on our cheerleaders, in the commercials of our sponsors, the silhouettes of our network sideline reporters and the crowd shots by our network broadcast teams - to titillate and to fill downtime. We have hoped that our viewers would discuss women's breasts and imagine women's breasts, speculate on their authenticity, ponder nipple color and size, daydream of seizing those spongy masses and twisting them this way and then that way, of burying one's face in them like a spaniel at the dinner bowl. Above all, we have hoped that our viewers will associate women's breasts with the National Football League.

But we never meant to show you the whole thing. We sincerely regret that our half-century long tease overshot its mark yesterday. We urge our viewers to forgive us, and to continue to content themselves with veils and innuendo in our future seasons.

P.S. And no pussy. Ever. Quite.

Sincerely,

Paul Tagliabue
NFL Commissioner

Unqualified Offerings salutes the Commissioner for saying what needed to be said. I only hope it's enough for Michael Powell.

Go Go Go! - Let's be clear: I have no desire, none whatever, for the US to "democratize" Iran by force. Iran needs to work out its own political destiny, and we'll be better off if we let them. But I'm definitely rooting for the liberals there, and salute their attempts to break the hold of the fundamentalists.

"An election whose result is clear beforehand is a treason to the rights and ideals of the nation," one of the resigning legislators, Rajab Ali Mazrouei, told the parliament.

More here.

Everything You Need to Know about the sudden discovery that the Administration was misled by the CIA into believing Iraq had extensive special weapons capabilities is contained in a single Matthew Yglesias item. That said, Atrios is having tons of fun playing Remember When with Post columnist Jim Hoagland and others, starting here and scrolling up.

This is Sports Center with Unqualified Offerings - Close Super Bowl, down to the last seconds, and yet, somehow less involving than other recent thrillers. RGB Bill, with whom I watched the game, agreed. There's nothing quite so anticlimactic as a game in which the trailing team comes back to tie the score or go ahead too soon. Any more, when I team comes from behind with more than a minute left on the clock, I expect the other team to march right down the field and win at the very end - it seems to happen over and over. And that a freak play, Kasay's OB kickoff before the last New England drive, bulked so large in the outcome of the game feels like a cheat somehow.

And I missed Janet Jackson's boobie. (Not work safe, except that all your co-workers will be looking at it too.

And did they make an announcement ahead of time that none of the advertisers were going to do anything impressive this year? Budweiser doesn't even give us Leon?

Bitch bitch bitch. Yeah, I was rooting for Carolina, but unlike Bill the Jets fan, I'm not broken up that New England won. For whatever reason, and I'd love some ideas, this game wasn't up there with Patriots/Rams, Rams/Titans or Packers/Broncos, which might get my vote for best Super Bowl ever. Okay, it definitely gets my vote for best Super Bowl ever, and I say that as someone who rooted for the Steelers in the 70s and the Redskins in the 80s.

Tuesday Morning Quarterback did pretty well for itself too. The Panthers violated two Immutable Laws: "Kick early, go for it late" and "Live by the blitz, die by the blitz."

Can we start the next season now? I want to see Joe Gibbs back in action already.

Weekly Fitness Blog Item - Frankly, there is nothing much to report this week. As for marathon prep, hah! It's so freaking cold the only running I would do is to my car - if the ice didn't make that a deadly temptation. So we're already at the end of the item, which means it's time for the weekly stats: weight 165, waist 33.5", pulse - no award. More next week. Maybe not much more, but something.

Your Only the British Press But... Link of the Day - Is to a Guardian story by Peter Beaumont, Gaby Hinsliff and Paul Harris, who write that

Senior American officials concluded at the beginning of last May that there were no weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in Iraq, The Observer has learnt.

Intelligence sources, policy makers and weapons inspectors familiar with the details of the hunt for WMD told The Observer it was widely known that Iraq had no WMD within three weeks of Baghdad falling, despite the assertions of senior Bush administration figures and the Prime Minister, Tony Blair.

Contemporaneously, I noted that the Administration wasn't acting like it believed Iraq had WSDs - it was too nonchalant about securing sites and deploying survey teams. They were acting at a pace that, had the weapons existed, would have ensured that real terror groups could get their hands on them before we could. The choice was simple: either the government was criminally nonchalant about Iraq's arsenal, or it knew perfectly well the arsenal didn't exist.

A problem is that both the US and British governments continued to act, toward their publics, as if the question were far less settled than it actually turns out to have been - indeed, they continued to act as if it were settled in the other direction:

Indeed, comments from a senior Washington official first casting serious doubt on the existence of WMD were put to Downing Street by The Observer - and rejected - as early as 3 May.

Did the US and British govrnments believe that Iraq had WSDs before the war? Keep in mind that governments are compound entities, and "Weapons of Mass Destruction" is an elastic concept. I think the strongest case you can make is that those commanding the invasion phase of the war believed Iraq had some deployable battlefield chemical weapons. That belief was probably shared, with varying degrees of conviction, throughout the national security sector of the government (up to and including the White House). I base this not just on the official statements during the war that leaders believed our troops were about to cross a line beyond which chemical weapons would be used but on the fact that, for most of the invasion, the troops were instructed to adhere to CBW defense protocols. It's possible the military leaders were themselves deceived by clued-in political appointees eager to put on a good show, but the implications of the possibility are unpleasant and I reject it in the absence of positive evidence.

What about the rest of it? The years'-long bipartisan insistence that Iraq was rearming, or still armed, or about to add water to their "reconstituted nuclear weapons?"

The current, most popular apologias seem to be

1) Saddam tried to bluff the world into thinking he still had Bad Things to maintain power and status. We called his bluff. Boo hoo hoo.

2) Saddam was such a decreasingly attached-to-reality tyrant that his own military and technical people fooled him into thinking he still had functioning special weapons stockpiles and production facilities. We were as fooled as he, and too bad for him.

The first thing to note is that they can't both be true. Saddam could not simultaneously believe and pretend that he retained banned weapon capabilities. The second thing to note is that that doesn't mean one of them isn't true. The third thing to note is that both theories have a strong sense of "latest line of defense" about them - when so many previous pro-government positions have crumbled in series, and the rhetorical declension proceeds from "weapons of mass destruction" through "weapons of mass destruction program-related activities," there's scant reason to believe the Ball of Disillusion has come to rest against its final wall.

So what the hell happened? The official hawks, like bad dope dealers, got too fond of their own product. They wanted it to be true and convinced themselves of their desires. From the mid-1990s on, we had a parade of defectors. Some of them said Iraq's weapons programs were kaput, some said they were worse than you could imagine, and the hawks systematically credited the most alarming reports. These defectors tended to be funneled through parties with an institutional interest in provoking war, like the Iraqi National Congress.

What about the rest of the government, from Clinton days to now? It's worth pointing out, yet again, that as recently as the Spring of 2001, Colin Powell argued that sanctions should be kept because they had prevented Iraq from re-arming. I suspect that, as the year goes on, we'll hear more and more reports that there was always a strong current of skepticism within the intelligence community, which will problematize the view that there was a universal consensus that Iraq retained chemical and biological weapons capability.

But, the fact remains: not just hawks within the bureaucracy agreed that Saddam's capabilities were more extensive than they turned out to be. (Reminder: they turned out to be nonexistent.) Why?

I suspect the answer is structural. If you're an intelligence professional and you're going to be wrong on the issue, you'll be less embarrassed to be wrong on the "safe side," the side that the danger is there. Furthermore, during the period where the consensus view was forming, the stakes were altogether lower than they became beginning in the Spring of 2002. Before 2002, the issue wasn't all-out-war or continued low-grade conflict - it was continued low-grade conflict or - continued low-grade conflict. There was little chance that pushing doubts about Iraq's capability would meaninfully affect policy, and a potentially big downside if one's doubts turned out to be wrong. So a default consensus gelled, and come the push for war, stuck.

Many of us doves in the civilian sphere allowed ourselves to be stuck in the consensus view. Since we believed the mere existence of Iraqi special weapons an insuffiicient case for war, we decided not to sweat the issue. We either believed that deterrence theory applied to Iraq or that the Winter Inspections program begun by the UN was capable of eliminating any weapons Iraq did have, so we either granted that Saddam had WSDs for the sake of argument or, in my case at least, accepted that the consensus view probably was correct, to the extent that Iraq had some level of tactical chemical or biological weaponry.

You can make a good case that, by so doing, we doomed our chances of prevailing. Our "reasonable" opposition gave the hawks too much uncontested ground. We should have been able to puzzle out the flaws in the consensus view from the start, and demanded that the hawks prove every inch of their case. Well, lesson learned.