Debate Blogging because I want to fit in. Actual dialog from early in the evening:

Me: How can you take these imbeciles seriously?

Mrs. Offering: It's hard.

A confession: I don't watch much TV, except for sports. I never watch TV news. I skip most States of the Union and missed all but a minute or two of both convention acceptance speeches. When I want to know what someone said in those things, I read the transcript. What that means is that I've actually seen and heard John Kerry and George W. Bush rarely over the last few months and, indeed, years.

What a couple of unpleasant people to watch.

Kerry should have been a German father lecturing his kids at the dinner table. Bush has a smirk that's just begging to get wiped off his smug face, even when he's not smirking.

All that said, keeping in mind that I count as an opponent of the President and no fan of the challenger, but who, on balance, wants the President gone, who won? I would say Bush won early, and Kerry won, more narrowly, late. Bush managed to present a more sharply-focused thesis throughout the early part: We win by staying on the offensive; You can't lead troops by telling them Wrong War, Wrong Place, Wrong Time; You can't build alliances by denigrating the contributions of the allies you already have. You could even say he presented a coherent argument: My opponent says he wants more cooperation but his inconsistencies undermine the possibility of same.

It's an appealing, and intuitively sensible argument. I disagree with most of it. Kerry eventually managed to effectively disagree with it by arguing that "Consistent but wrong" is not a virtue. It took him more than an hour to formulate that response, though, at the general level. Once he did formulate it, I thought he started to gain the edge on his opponent, not just rhetorically but even in all those soft qualities that They tell us are what really matter in the debate - comfort level, self-confidence, groundedness. And Bush started to go off his game. He missed, for example, a perfect opportunity to tie a North Korean ribbon around his rhetorical package: My opponent says he's for gathering allies, but ironically he wants to junk the allies we've got and go it alone in negotiations with Kim Jong-Il. A chuckling, "Who's multilateral now?" jest might have been the There you go again of this year's debates.

An hour and a half goes by of Bush chiding Kerry for hoping that "one more resolution" would have led Saddam to disarm when all the others had failed and Kerry never gets around to saying, What the hell are you talking about? He WAS disarmed! We know that for a fact, now. Cue wistful reference to Lincoln and Douglas.

From my perspective, Kerry got the better of the North Korean and Russian nuclear material issues that dominated the late stage of the debate. Not only did he present a stronger substantive case, but it seemed to imbue him with more confidence.

Things that naturally didn't come up: torture; the costs of interventionism; how much of a blank check to give Ariel Sharon's Likud government; whether we truthfully want to democratize cooperative Muslim autocracies or should want to; our continuing involvement in the Andean Initiative; sanctions on Cuba; the difference between prudence and panic in anti-terror policy. What we had was vigorous disagreement on tactics with no serious debate on grand strategy. Both candidates agree that America must be the busiest busybody in the busy busy world. The rest is a question of application.

Worthwhile Canadian Initiative - Artist Sylvia Nickerson's "Flower Knives" from the New Quarterly. Link via Nobilist.

Pong Fu - Pretty amusing. Link is a video.

Thick as a Brick - Matt Hogan tips me to an interesting article on cement and concrete shortages. Hey come on! This stuff matters:

It's a serious and costly problem for construction firms, which depend on cement to build everything from home foundations to highways to swimming pools. Because contracts are typically signed months in advance, firms are usually unable to pass along the added costs to their customers. And construction companies are being forced to leave some of their crews idle for days at a time as they wait for cement to arrive, leading to expensive delays.

For consumers in some parts of the USA , it means home projects, such as the pouring of a new driveway, may be delayed or even canceled. And the cost will likely be higher than estimated a few months ago.

Why are we idling workers in the construction industry? Among other reasons:

The U.S. has imposed tariffs on Mexican cement since 1990 after the U.S. accused Mexico of dumping cement on the U.S. market or selling below cost.

Currently, the tariff amounts to about a 40% addition to the Mexican firms' selling price for cement. It's been as high as 80%. Even with the tariffs, Mexican cement is flowing into the USA , accounting for about a quarter of all U.S. cement imports.

But the construction groups claim there is enough excess cement in Mexico to put a large dent in the U.S. shortage if the cement could come in unencumbered. Plus, the NAHB says, the impact could be felt quickly, noting it takes only four days for cement to be imported into the USA from Mexico , less than one-tenth of the time it takes for the product to come from Asia

But you can't just BUY cement from Mexico. Oh no! You can't even just drop your stupid tariff either:

Commerce Department officials have been in negotiations with their counterparts in Mexico and with the U.S. cement industry, which has supported the tariffs. One option under consideration involves targeted relief, meaning tariffs would be reduced or removed from cement coming from Mexico into specific parts of the USA where cement supplies are low.

Although the negotiations have been taking place almost weekly, a decision is not imminent.

At least we're not idling our trade negotiators and lobbyists. I bet their driveways get poured on time, too.

At Least the NAME Doesn't Stink - According to a survey by the University of Pennsylvania's National Annenberg Election Survey conducted over the last year, only 9% of American Indians find the name of the Washington Redskins "offensive," reports AP. I'm not surprised. I recall a survey from a couple of years ago showed the same results. And here's a tidbit:

The franchise began in Boston as the Braves but was purchased in 1932 by George Preston Marshall, who changed the name to honor head coach William "Lone Star" Dietz, an American Indian.

Marshall's conduct toward black people was terrible. He was the last owner in the NFL to sign an African-American athlete. But he doesn't seem to have had similar retrograde attitudes toward Native Americans. Not surprising, since, like I said, "People choose team for their admirable associations. Nobody names their teams the Doofuses, the Rejects or the Grifters either."

This Time It's Personal - Gene Healy on NPR's strange concept of "gun safety."

Yogablogging! - Well, why the hell not? Alan Little has quite a lot of it. I've been thinking about yoga as an adjunct to running lately, and figure I could take it safely, being a man. (Women who get to be my age and start yoga for the first time seem inevitably to divorce within two years.) Some interesting stuff on Alan's site, including considerations of whether "yoga therapy" might l"ead to a short term, quick fix orientation that is foreign to real yoga practice." One friend took up yoga over the summer and told me "I was surprised to find it kicks my ass."

Let's Not Get Too Excited - Mrs. Offering forwards me Thomas Oliphant's column in the Boston Globe suggesting that Libertarian Presidential candidate Michael Badnarik (whose name he can't spell) may end up costing George Bush the state of Nevada and its five electoral votes. As a libertarian who plans to vote Libertarian for the third time and who would still, on balance, like to see George Bush lose, I'd like to get excited about this. I worry that Oliphant, good Boston liberal that he is, is seeing what he wants to see.

However, the latest polls appear to show Badnarik with more votes than the margin between Bush and Kerry. I suspect that a lot of normally Republican voters in Badnarik's column will come to Jesus on voting day and leave Badnarik with the Party's customary sub-one percent share, but perhaps Nevada will surprise me.

The Long Twilight Struggle Continues between the CIA and the White House. I wonder if Porter Goss will unilaterally disarm. Bureaucratic capture being what it is, I wouldn't count on it. What's interesting is that Novak says the analysts who warned ahead of time that Iraq would likely turn out . . . like it's turned out, and that our image in the Muslim world would drop to . . . the levels they're at now, never even quite managed to reach their boss with their concerns:

When Pillar was asked why this was not made clear to the president and other higher authorities, his answer was that nobody asked -- not even Tenet.

Novak is clearly still doing his best to get back on the White House's good side after all the trouble he caused them:

Modern history is filled with intelligence bureaus turning against their own governments, for good or ill. In the final days of World War II, the German Abwehr conspired against Hitler.

(Note: For the Times links, use the login "offerings/offerings" if you haven't got your own.)

Such a Shame How These Things Work Out - Jeff Taylor notes the unfortunate pattern in Pakistan:

Wanted al Qaeda insider Amjad Farooqi is dead, killed in a shoot-out with Pakistani security forces just as President General Pervez Musharraf visits the United States. Great timing, that. Trouble is Farooqi was rumored to be in custody months ago.

Farooqi was wanted in connection with the slaying of American reporter Daniel Pearl as well as for his contacts with top al Qaeda elements in Pakistan. He was also fingered as responsible for assassination attempts on Musharraf, making Farooqi a very big catch indeed. But.

Western intelligence services must be wondering about how top Pakistani terror targets always wind up dead instead of interrogated by the West for several months. And some Pakistanis wonder if Farooqi's death is a little too convenient, effectively ending the investigations into both the Pearl murder and the Musharraf attacks before any potential connection to a powerful someone, somewhere gets found out.

I Got Rhythm - Via Costello-L, here'a cool site where you can hear just about any kind of percussion instrument you care to name. Actually, the site, Virtual Orchestra, will play almost any symphonic instrument for you.

Just don't let the Wolf catch Peter!

Ouch - Suffering through the Redskins game tonight. Tomorrow, a special "How Wrong You Are About Rwanda, Jim" mailbag.

Party Blogging - Went to a cool housewarming party at Justin Logan's new, and freshly-renovated, apartment in Columbia Heights last night with a Cato-centric crowd. Had a great time. Gene Healy talked about his martial art of choice, Krav Maga, the Israeli self-defense discipline. From Orange belt on up, apparently, it's all about defending yourself from people with knives and guns. (Gene: "They tell you, if someone points a gun at you and says 'Give me your wallet," give them your wallet. It's only when they say 'Get in the trunk' that you're supposed to go after them.") Brooke Oberwetter reprised her on-blog defense of outed Congressman Dan Dreier for Mrs. Offering, though allowing that Dreier's vote against gay adoptions was harder to justify than his others. She also told us all about her new puppy. That's right, Brooke "Le Mot Juste" Oberwetter, the razor-sharp, the incisive, the bracing wit and terror of softheadedness of all sorts, has a fuzzy little puppy. A beagle puppy. A kissy beagle puppy. Aw, as they say. This strikes me as a natural progression from taking in guest bloggers. (Seriously, as another dog person, I'm nothing but delighted.)

I met ex-Obernews guest blogger Adrienne Aldredge. It went like this:

Me: Adrienne Aldredge! Jim Henley.

Adrienne: How old are you?

Kids these days.

I should state right out that she had an excuse. As she explained, being a young libertarian (she is fifteen and a ha - no, I kid! she is 21) a lot of her college fellows tell her she just believes the sorts of things she does because "You're young and naive." And here was I, someone who believes the things she does and is decidedly NOT . . . young.

Julian Sanchez held forth in defense of Kinsey's sexuality spectrum, to a certain amount of skepticism from, well, me. It became clear to me that we were each generalizing our own limited (in our separate ways) experience into articles of faith.

Will Wilkinson was there, which occasioned much discussion of the Max Borders kerfuffle. And I had a great time discussing health, fitness and sports with Courtney Knapp.

That About Sums It Up - Chad Orzel speaks dog, and has translated a new History of the Past Couple of Years.

Bastards! BASTARDS! - So after all the fitness blogging last year and all the running this year, I get my blood tests back, and I've dropped my LDL cholesterol from 152 to 96 in a year and a half - and Science goes and drops the recommended ceiling from 99 to 70. Those rotten sons of bitches! My doctor wants to start me on a statin. I realize this is not in itself a terrible thing, but I'm a man, dammit. We cheat on hearing tests. We're competitive to a fault. And this means I "lost" my !#^%$#@$ blood test game!

UPDATE: Rereading the NYT article, I think my GP is cracked - the 70 ceiling is for people in the highest risk category, which is folks who have established heart disease AND another risk factor. I have one risk factor (hypertension), but no existing heart disease. So I win!

Now Playing - FInally picked up The Delivery Man today, a good two days after it became available. Ah, age. It makes us slow and lazy. I put a fair amount of effort into trying to like his previous rock album, When I Was Cruel, but ultimately it didn't take. Liking this one - I'm in mid-first listen - is taking no effort at all.

This is Costello's Americana album, recorded in Mississippi with the his road band, the Imposters, plus duets by Lucinda Williams (one song) and Emmylou Harris (three). It's a demi-quasi-deliberately-subverted concept album. Several of the songs are part of a fractured, out-of-order and by no means crucial to enjoying the record narrative about a delivery man in a small southern town who makes all the ladies' hearts go pitter-pat, and who, many years ago, killed a childhood friend.

My favorite two Costello albums of the last dozen years have been the art song cycle with the string quartet (The Juliet Letters) and the orchestral pop collaboration with Burt Bacharach (Painted from Memory). After Cruel, I half decided that Costello should just stop making the occasional rock CD on the grounds that he'd lost his feel for it. If so, he got it back.

This is less a review than a first-listen play-by-play. The album alternates rockers and ballads. I'm not wild about the first two songs, "Button my Lip" and "Country Darkness." The latter is too . . . English in its instrumentation. "Lip" has a lot of energy, but I've already forgotten how it goes.

Starting with track three, however, this is almost nonstop joy. "Story in Your Voice" is the duet with Lucinda Williams. Strong tune, steady beat, soaring vocal lines and Williams growls and snarls her way through it with gusto. There's some controversy on Costello-L about how well their voices mesh. To me, they fall safely into ragged but right territory. "EIther Side of the Same Town" is soul-inflected country music like they make in the Mississippi Valley. Bassist Davey Faragher contributes a wonderful harmony vocal. Since Elvis has had only himself (multi-tracked) as a backup singer for most of his career, hearing a second voice is a novelty. A good one too.

"Bedlam" is the album's masterpiece - current events as a rapid-fire series of curveball lyrics fired at "Subterranean Homesick Blues" pace. The next semi-clunker doesn't come until track 8, "Nothing Clings Like Ivy." This is a real country ballad, and the first appearance of Emmylou Harris. It's a minimalist melody and . . . leisurely rhythm scoring spare lyrics. It didn't leave much of an impression on first listen. Better is "Heart-Shaped Bruise" two tracks later, which is also a country ballad featuring Emmylou Harris, but a more engaging song.

The penultimate song is "The Judgment," which Costello wrote for Solomon Burke. This version is, to my mind, ruined by Steve Nieve's overly obtrusive upright piano. Hardcore Costello fandom divides into pro-Steve and anti-Steve factions and I'm often in the anti camp. This song won't make me budge.

The closer is "The Scarlet Tide." Alison Krauss sang the version on the soundtrack to the Cold Mountain movie. This is another spare song, but a damn fine one. This rendition is Elvis and Emmylou singing along with a ukelele. The chorus:

We'll rise above the scarlet tide That trickles down the mountain And separates the widow from the bride

The "scarlet tide" is war of course, but it's not hard to take it to be time itself, the looming shadow over so much of Costello's "mature" work. I have long thought that, at least since the early 1990s, Costello had become (semi) popular music's Philip Larkin. The implacable clock and the imponderable beyond it haunt most of his 90s work, from "Couldn't Call It Unexpected #4" on Mighty Like a Rose through most of The Juliet Letters to the most compelling parts of the uneven lapsed-Catholic album, All This Useless Beauty. In the Bacharach collaboration Painted from Memory, Death takes a holiday - only the Lesser Abyss within the human heart troubles that record. The Delivery Man is a country record and a soul record. Those are genres with some deep shadows in them, unless you go out of your way to avoid certain hollows and swamps, as contemporary radio country does assiduously. It's good territory for Costello. I started my second listen before I even got to this paragraph.

More from the Party of Limited Government - Republican candidate for the Senate in MarylandIllinois Alan Keyes does not like polls, as you might imagine given his numbers. And he knows just what to do about them:

"They (polls) are manipulative and degrading and damaging to our political system, and they should not be allowed when it comes to the actual time frame in which people are making up their minds," Keyes said during a meeting with The Pantagraph's editorial board

Side issue: Is "The Pantagraph" the coolest newspaper name ever? Yes. Without Question.

Anyway, Keyes wants to ban polls; George Bush wants to get rid of all that unregulated political speech and John McCain can barely contain his fury that the FEC restricts itself to enforcing the stupid law he authored rather than the stupider law he wishes he'd thought up. He won't be happy until everyone who ever tried to run a political ad is in a tiger cage somewhere.

I see a pattern.

Let's Think About Something Else Instead - Drezner has an item on The Neocon Split Over George W. Bush.

A few weeks ago I was talking with someone far more plugged into Washington than myself. We were chatting about the neoconservatives and my breakfast partner raised an important distinction -- that one had to distinguish between the neocons who supported John McCain in 2000 (Robert Kagan, Bill Kristol) and the neocons who supported George W. Bush in 2000 (Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, Richard Perle). Both groups had the same overarching policy goals, but there was one important difference -- the McCain supporters understood that democracy promotion in the Middle East and elsewhere was not something that could be done on the cheap. In the case of Iraq, for example, the McCain neocons believed that statebuilding in Iraq would require a heavy force, while the Bush supporters bought into Rumsfeld's idea that shock, awe, and a light force could do the trick.

This split has persisted in the wake of what's happened in Iraq. However, there's now a deeper question that could really split the neocons -- is the Bush administration really interrested in democracy promotion at all?

My immediate, cynical reaction was, That lineup makes perfect sense: on one side you've got the people who actually have to implement policy in the real world; on the other, people who only have to bloviate about it in print.

But that cut a little close to home so I decided to find other stuff to read instead.

On the Radar - The Kerry speech on Iraq. At a first skim, it's best at harmonizing Kerry's vote for the Use of Farce resolution in Fall 2002 with his evolving criticisms of what the Bush Administration did afterward. I still hold Kerry's vote against him. You had to be wilfully naive by October 2002 to imagine that you were voting for anything other than war at a time of the Administration's choosing.

But he could be worse. He could be - the incumbent. Tim Cavanaugh's cockeyed optimism notwithstanding, I think the contemporary Republican Party is institutionally biased toward war. It's the closest thing to a consistent electoral winner the Party has. During the 1990s one facet of the argument of the "national greatness" conservatives was that the Republican Party had lost a winning issue with the end of the Cold War and needed to find a way to put "national security" front and center again. They were not so choosy about how they would manage this - new cold war with China? fear of "a resurgent Russia?" Confrontation with rogue states like Iraq? All of the above? Rotate according to a schedule? Whatever was to hand. National "security" was boffo in the 2002 midterms and may well put the President back in office a few weeks from now. A party doesn't turn its back on a winning strategy no matter how strong the incumbent's manana feeling. (I am also raining on Diana's parade here. And she was just trying to cheer me up.)

Besides, America's armed forces are second to none, which is why they're so useful to hide behind. If Bush's second term does suffer the usual run of scandal and discord Diana references, he'll have all the more incentive to keep the martial pot bubbling. Nothing new there. Look how much more military intervention the Clinton Administration undertook in its second edition compared to the first.

Nothing Gets Past Dave Intermittent. Or Eve Tushnet. Thanks, guys. I am indeed back and up to my old tricks. (Such as, announcing that I will soon blog about A and then blogging about B instead.)

It's hard, though. Frex, I was going to suggest that the Democrats may have proven themselves foolish in throwing over Howard Dean for John Kerry. Turns out, though, that Daniel Radosh already made the points I wanted to make a week ago.

The problem with picking someone solely because he is electable is that if it turns out (ahem) that he is not, what are you left with? I'm not saying Dean could have defeated Bush. Honesty, he probably couldn't (Edwards had a better shot). But you can be sure that right now we'd be having a real national debate about the issues, and that Howard Dean would be setting the terms of that debate.

I think this is exactly right. Dean was widely ridiculed for saying something that turned out to be perfectly true (the capture of Saddam Hussein has not made America safer). The fact that he said it when it wasn't popular might have stood him in good stead once it became obvious - foreign policy as character issue. Then there's the famous "Dean Scream." This strikes me as the sort of thing any competent politician would have been able to defuse with irony, given a couple of weeks to work with it. If Ross Perot could finesse "Crazy," Howard Dean could have turned the tables on the Scream. Perhaps in the end the odd sense of distance between Dean and his wife would have done him in - sad, since Mrs. Dr. Steinberg Dean was my favorite thing about his candidacy - there's something about a brainy, good-looking political wife with no interest in politics that gets my libertarian juices flowing. Not that you wanted to know that.

Hey, maybe it wouldn't have worked. But nominating Dean wouldn't have represented Democratic activists second-guessing themselves the way choosing John "Electable" Kerry did. Watch, now Kerry will win and I'll look stupid. (And what's worse, John Kerry will be President. About the only less appealing outcome I can imagine is if George Bush were President.) But even if he does win, let's admit it, this campaign season has sucked in ways a Bush-Dean matchup wouldn't have sucked.

NOW How Much Would You Pay? - The official unofficial scuttlebutt is that after we get through all this election bother and the Bush Administration has packed this Kerry Edwards guy back to the Senate, things will start hopping. The New York Times says American commanders "are preparing operations to open up rebel-held areas" between our election day (a formality) and Iraq's (a fantasy). (Via Matt.) Meanwhile there's more official unofficial scuttlebutt that we're planning a bigass attack on Iran's nuclear infrastructure, or at least the parts we can find and hit. Meanwhile Kevin Drum has been warning and warbloggers across the land have been hoping that "a vote for Bush is a vote for more wars." Iran? Syria? Sure.

A fair and balanced appraisal of the rumors out there requires one to acknowledge that while some aspects of the talk may be cynical manipulation of the base - reassuring Administration-friendly voters and elites - other parts may be sincere, genuine batshit craziness.

Let me put it this way: how much would you like to pay for gas? At a very rough estimate, our ingenious plan to stabilize the world's major oil-producing region has taken about a billion barrels a day out of the supply chain (amortizing the various, continuing! losses of production or export to war, reconstruction follies and sabotage). We're paying about a quarter per gallon more for gas in this country than in the summer before Operation Rocky Freedom.

So go ahead. Attack Iran! Bomb the shit out of wherever you think the nukes are, or just take the place over with whatever troops you can scrape together. You think you have sabotage in Southern Iraq to worry about now? Just wait until our pals the Iraqi Shiites see American bombs falling on their big Persian brothers. (The compulsively readable one makes this point himself.) Now add in sabotage in Iran, sabotage in any oil patch where there's a sizable contingent of Shiite guest workers. Hell, maybe we get another OPEC boycott out of the deal. We'll just take over the Saudi oil fields then! That'll show the bastards! Yes. Sure. And we've got no ability whatsoever to run the bulk of the Middle East's oil production ourselves, by command - to secure the wells, the pipes, the ports; to get people to show up to work and put in an honest day's labor or to coordinate bringing in new workers who will. We cannot even reliably pump the oil out of the one country we have taken over so far. On the bright side, further Middle Eastern wars in the short term may just bring this whole benevolent hegemony business crashing down in a hurry, once we can't fuel it. On the downside, it would really suck to be us. Surely there are more pleasant ways to get my humbler America.

As for the drive to retake rebel-held areas of Iraq, first, I'm sorry, back before the war - hell, back last summer - November even - which blog would give you more of an impression that, a year and a half after the commencement of Operation Rocky Freedom, there might be "rebel-held areas of Iraq," this one here, or those big strategic thinker blogs like Winds of Change?

Sorry. Hardly back from hiatus and siezed by an Advantage: Whoever fit. You deserve better for your patience. Anyway, here's a short history of the future in which we launch our drive to retake "rebel-held areas of Iraq" right after the November elections.

Tacitus writes something rueful but stirring, full of sorrow that this necessary step was so long delayed but grimly reassured that at last the country is meeting its responsibilities. Even I am moved, briefly. Dan Darling posts an impressive-looking order of battle followed by vatic pronouncements about the certain doom facing the enemy. Someone named Trent Telenko appends 50 comments about how we "Jacksonians" are going to end up having to kill all the Muslims anyway, not that the idea gives him any pleasure, you understand. The newspapers all report that military spokespeople announce that hundreds/thousands of insurgents/terrorists/guerrillas/anti-Iraqi forces/deadenders/rebels have been killed. Some newspapers pick the wrong term from the list of options in an article or two and Glenn Reynolds links to 50 bloggers expressing their outrage. The Command Post goes into overdrive, and does an excellent job of posting breaking news. Foreign news sources have the bad taste to show dead bodies, proving that they are not patriotic Americans at all. Somebody stops to add up the Fermi numbers of enemy casualties and compares it to public estimates of the size of the resistance back in Fall 2003. This person does not get linked by Glenn Reynolds. Mark Steyn reprints his annual column about how the press is ignoring the good news from Iraq. Military spokespeople announce that they believe they might be very close to capturing or killing someone who may be either Abu Zarqawi or a popular female impersonator come to Anbar province to perform at an anniversary party in the desert. Most importantly, military spokespeople announce that we're winning, and soon thereafter, that we've won. Iraqi police and army units are bused into recaptured towns with great fanfare. We actually capture or kill Abu Zarqawi. Cries of triumph ring from NRO to Little Green Footballs.

And then it unravels over the next few weeks and months, on schedule. The inside pages of the nation's newspapers note that some of those Iraqi police and army units aren't showing up for work every day, and a few of them may, may you understand, be supplying weapons to the rebels. Oh yeah. It turns out there are still rebels out there. Some IEDs go off. A few suicide bombs. A brief quiet becomes decidedly less so. Some version of an election is held, at the end of which various personages pronounce themselves unsatisfied. None of these people work in the White House. It dawns that arrangements to turn security over to "Iraqi army and police units" amount to reestablishing No-Go zones. Military spokespeople caution reporters that there may be a spike in violence in the runup to the inauguration of the new government since "that's what the insurgents most fear." Hawks darkly mutter that they'd have gotten away with it too, if not for those treasonous doves.

Then the whole cycle starts again, because that's how hell works.

Aim? True. - From the Scotland on Sunday profile of Elvis Costello this morning:

"It's more against fear than it is against war. 'Cause it's the fear that allows the war to happen. And that idea is going through the record."

Tuesday!

Are You Sure About That? - Matthew writes

One, as I've said before, a person of my generation got to watch a dreary catalogue of events in the nineties whereby there was much human suffering owing to American failure to use force (Rwanda), delay in the use of force (Bosnia), or hesitancy to expose our soldiers to risk (Kosovo). This created a predisposition toward "hawkishness" as a generic position.

Now on the raw facts of the matter, I'm inclined to give him one out of three only. The thing with Kosovo is that we were fed what I would call lies and the more charitable might prefer to call overestimates about just how bad things were there. The claimed "100,000" dead Kosovar civilians pre-war shrank to a few thousand dead, including combatants on both sides, of all causes including our own bombing, after the war. It was a nasty insurgency/counter-insurgency fight between a tinpot tyranny on one side and a terroristic nationalist underground on the other, with an awful lot of civilians caught in the middle. There is no doubt that the Yugoslav government committed atrocities - Matthew Hogan convinced me beyond doubt that Racak was a real massacre, for instance - but in scale nothing about the Kosovo campaign stuck out from any number of asymmetrical conflicts around the globe. You could swap Kosovo out of the list and swap in any place from Sri Lanka to Nigeria. The fact that you could shows either just how much proponents of humanitarian intervention are willing to bite off, or just how arbitrarily foreign conflicts end up on the nation's official pity list. Kosovo was, until our own bombing campaign created a massive refugee stream, a much smaller conflict than Bosnia, let alone Rwanda.

Ah, Rwanda. I still get mad when people talk shit about that slaughter. As I've said before, Rwanda made me an isolationist, so I won't reproduce the reasons here. Instead, I want to talk about something else, the notion that the US could have done much good there militarily while the genocide was going on. The claim strikes me as unproven and dubious on its face. The logistics of moving enough troops to Central Africa in time to stop the slaughter any faster than the Tutsi resistance stopped it themselves are pretty daunting. It's not a country where we'd have had much detailed intelligence. Perhaps the Belgians and French would have shared, but the Belgians and French showed a disturbing willingness to shelter the malefactors. "Using force" would have meant plopping US troops over a matter of weeks into the middle of a situation they understood only partially. "Shoot the short ones and spare the tall ones" doesn't really make it as a mission briefing, especially since the butchers themselves were wont to kill fellow shorties who lacked the requisite bloodlust.

And, guess what! The genocide is over, but the slaughter continues, somewhere just beyond the edges of your newspaper. "Using force" would have meant wading into - yes - a quagmire.

Could we have stopped the actual genocide any faster than the Tutsi resistance itself did? I have my doubts. As it is, the resistance fought what was called at the time one of the most impressive light infantry campaigns of the modern era. (I can't find a link. I remember the analysis in the dead-tree Washington Post.)

That leaves Bosnia. I don't subscribe to the reverse "Serbs all good, Bosniaks all bad" typology that a lot of paleos do. I ached for intervention all through the 90s - I even wrote two anguished poems about our inaction that will never see the light of day. Now I'm glad we didn't intervene, and regret only that we kept teasing the Muslim-led government into thinking we cared about them more than we did. But I think that, philosophical differences aside, Bosnia presents the most likely scenario for early US intervention minimizing future bloodshed.

Maybe. Or maybe intervening before the combatants themselves were exhausted would have involved us in one more guerrilla war. Maybe Serb terrorists start blowing up American buildings and setting off truck bombs next to our convoys. Maybe not. I'm far less certain that, considered purely from the local perspective, US intervention would have led to as much chaos as we've fostered in Mesopotamia. But it's a real risk we would have run.

In a way, enthusiasts of humanitarian intervention suffer the same blind spots as the neohawks, which is not surprising, since the neohawks are humanitarian interventionists of a kind, so long as the sun is shining and the locals smile at our tanks - they think it's all too easy. How? Partly by ignoring possible complications; partly by assuming that we must know what's going on in all these strange places and, for that reason, folks there see things the same way we do. There is also, at the core of the interventionist impulse, a condescension toward the Other. Assuming that the malefactors will essentially melt before us (viz. Somalia) is assuming that they are not serious people. Pulling a Paglia for a second and quoting myself:

But one could only imagine the warlords not objecting to this, and violently, if one somehow couldn't imagine that these swarthy foreigners took themselves and their own ambitions seriously. One had to believe either that the warlords were attempting to shoot and starve their enemies into submission by mistake, and would be grateful when shown the error of their ways, or that they had made the decision to try to shoot and starve their way to power lightly, and that once US attention turned like the gaze of a stern yet kindly parent upon these errant children, they would cast their little eyes down, mutter "Sorry, mom," and go play right. In US perceptions, the warlords could have been idiots, children or cowards. What US policy could not have been based on was a sober appreciation that the US was setting itself against serious, adult power brokers who cared more for their own plans than American ones.

I wrote that about Somalia, but it applies to the dynamic of every "humanitarian" intervention on offer. In some cases, the folks we're setting ourselves against may indeed knuckle under, or, if they're Haitian, wait for us to get bored and leave. But we can't count on it. Even when we can get there in time, assuming we want to.

Stuck in the Middle with Mail - Mr. Mesolibertarianism, Matthew Hogan, weighs in on the Topic of the Moment. No, not vintage typewriters!

1. National Greatness Conservatism and neoconservatism may not be the same thing, but are close enough not to be a great difference as far as I can tell. Explain, if not. Use one sheet of paper, do not write on back, no stray marks or textbooks.

2. What makes the neocons tick is the belief in America as world ruler and the American government with a right-man's burden to absorb the costs, moral and material, thereto.

3. The specific agenda for going into Iraq WAS neoconservative, let's not mince words. The driving enabling emotional force was however as Diana points out a public generic stomp-the-Arabs post 9/11.

4. The neoconservatives rode that; and yes being an articulate force with an answer at a time of Administration fears as well as American ones, their agenda dominated. Not oil, and to the next issue ... not Israel. They have the access and coherence to affect top level decisions.

5. There is a Likud and Israel fetish (a sort of "Mini-me" concept) among neoconservatives that is undeniable. And neoconservatism was nurtured extensively among a relatively small group of largely Jewish intellectuals. How important that is is a second question. The fact is that the neocons are generally not mere cyphers for Israel and Likud despite a solicitousness, a like-mindedness, and passionate attachment that often rises to the ridiculous. That mindless pro-Israel feelings may have factored into their calculation is no doubt probable, but not all succumb, as Wolfowitz exhibits with his absence of knee jerk anti-Islamic or anti-Palestinian sentiment. The paleocons dwell, for reasons simplistic and yes, worse, on the Israel connection. But the neocons are not a cabal (who uses that word?), rather an identifiable and rather open group of public figures.

6. OTOH, not being able to talk about the pro-Israel fetish of the neconservatives and how it may affect thinking and action on key national security players is likely to promote anti-semitism. Politically correct calls for silence nurture whispers of resentment. To say that the neocons are doing the distorted Iraq war thing for Israel, or primarily so, is nevertheless flat out wrong and likely appeals to and may come from bigotry. However it is not inherently anti-semitic. For someone to say that people are acting out of their personal and ideological attachments and biases is to e merely accuse them of acting in accord with normal human nature's tendencies, to downplay it is ironically to suggest a non-humanity to them.

7. The paleos and far lefties share more than an extreme position on hte proverbial spectrum. Both tend to be nationalists of sorts, the paleos in a obvious way, the counterpunchies in the sense of deciding that this or that group are all bad or all good according to the ideological positioning of the moment. (paleolibs, like antiwar.com do that too, the Serbs are all good and deserving of all our love for example, though at least now however they've taken down the no-massacre-at Srebenica crap on the site). For now for the coutnerpunchies the Israelis in their eyes are all bad, in great part because they are so close to and identified with America, in good part because many have seen the uglier side of Israel cutting their teeth on that part of the left, and in some part because some of the lefties with their group think and paranoia of perceived elites just dont like Jews either.

Meanwhile, Diana Moon responds, mostly to Justin Raimondo's e-mail printed here yesterday, and Leonard Dickens offers an anarchist perspective.

Me? I know I'm dragging this out, but I've got a ten-mile run tomorrow morning.

Stuck in the Middle with You - Sunday I referred to both Justin Raimondo and Diana Moon, which brought some critical comments from - Justin Raimondo and Diana Moon! If I were more fatuous I'd tell you that this proves I must be doing something right, but these situations never prove anything of the sort. Diana's response came in the form of yonder blog item which you should go read. Really. We'll be coming back to this stuff. She corrects some misinterpretations of mine about what she was trying to say and raises new issues. Justin's response came in the form of an e-mail:

I realize calling me "nuts" will put you in good stead with the libertarian Beltway crowd, but your argument that "neoconservatives were not the decision-makers" evades the crucial point that "decision-makers" make decisions based on information passed to them by their subordinates: the neocons, in firm control of the second-tier national security bureaucracy, made sure that Laurie Mylroie, and not the CIA, had the President's ear. Cheney and Rumsfeld are not neocons, but the former has certainly ensconced them in his office as his Praetorian Guard, and Rummy bought into the neocons' agenda circa 1998.

Your diagnosis of my mental condition is also contradicted by your own post, which posits that the real culprit is "national greatness conservatism" as an idea. But what can this mean, other than the neoconservatives?

Ideas rule the world, and it is the neoconservative idea that brought us to where we are today. I don't see how anyone can dispute that and still retain a modicum of intellectual honest.

We'll come back to this too! It involves wading into some logical, rhetorical and ethical swamps and it's probably going to take me several items to come close to explaining myself, and I'll probably wrong-foot it along the way.

The Wrong Way to Remake Hogan's Heroes - Remember how higher-ups in the Stalag system were always threatening their subordinates with transfers to the Russian front?? Now the Army has caught Colonel Klink Envy:

Hundreds of soldiers from the 3rd Brigade Combat Team were presented with that message and a re-enlistment form in a series of assemblies last week, two soldiers who spoke on condition of anonymity told the newspaper.

"They said if you refuse to re-enlist with the 3rd Brigade, we'll send you down to the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment, which is going to Iraq for a year, and you can stay with them, or we'll send you to Korea, or to Fort Riley (in Kansas) where they're going to Iraq," said one of the soldiers, a sergeant.

The second soldier, an enlisted man, echoed that view: "They told us if we don't re-enlist, then we'd have to be reassigned. And where we're most needed is in units that are going back to Iraq in the next couple of months. So if you think you're getting out, you're not."

I have an Army source, nameless for now, who has confirmed to me directly that he attended one of these assemblies and got the "offer" described:

The story was true. I was offered the option to re-enlist (or extend) until 2007, or face going to an Iraq-bound unit.

The hell of it is, it's a transparently bad deal, since, with an official unofficial Iraqi "involvement" of six years now on schedule, your chances of being sent back to Iraq multiple times over the three years of your new commitment approach certainty anyway.

But let's not bury the lede here. THE ARMY BRASS THREATENS SOLDIERS WITH DEPLOYMENTS TO IRAQ. What more would you like to know about troop morale, how the people actually enmeshed in the situation view it, and all the "good news" from over there that we're just not getting.

Helpful Hints - Remember the famous "Skippy's list" of things not to do in the army? Ginmar's CO has provided a Ginmar-specific update. Excerpts:

8. Omit the phrase, "Both sucks and blows, sir," when encouraged to speak frankly by a colonel.

9. Speaking frankly is not something that I will, ever, ever, ever have to worry about.

10. Keep in mind that the higher ranks probably have different definitions of 'frank' than I do.

11. No, it's not going to help to ask if I ask them, "Well, how frank, sir?"

12. Just because we've got new Marines does not mean I can tease them.

Some Things Aren't That Complicated - Matthew Yglesias has picked up something, at least, attending all those Reason get-togethers. This inspires the best rhetorical question of all time from Matthew Barganier. The whole thing got kicked off when Will Wilkinson applied a thousand syllogisms where a belly laugh would have sufficed.

That Would've Been COOL! - The Independent Institute's Ivan Eland asks "Have 1,000 U.S. Souls Died for Oil?" I ask, would it be too much to ask of a war for oil that we actually get some? Like I've been saying since, oh, October 2001, whatever else war is, it's a massive government program. If we invaded Greenland for the ice the place would melt underneath our boots.

Too tired to do mailbag tonight. Can we please wait until Thursday? Thank you.

Don't Let the Door Hit Your Ignorant, Nanny-State Ass on Your Way Out - The ten-year-old "assault weapon ban," aka the ban against guns that look scary expires today. I happened to see the ABC News segment on the law's passing and it was nearly as bad as most major-media gun reporting. They "balanced" gun restriction activists bemoaning the fact that it wasn't being replaced with a stronger law with gun shop owners and shooters agreeing that there might be an initial spike in demand. Not one word of opposition to the law. They finished the camera segment with a target range shooter saying that, yeah, he'll probably buy one of those soon. They allowed him to seem pleasant and friendly enough, which was nice of them, but what they could have done was, you know, ask "How come?" and let him answer.

To their credit, mind you, they followed with Peter Jennings giving a breakdown of who the market for such guns would be: target shooters and ex-police and military who used versions of them in their old jobs. Shine, perishing republic.

I only regret that the law didn't expire in time to save John Kerry from jail.

Some Typing Required -Let's face it. Topics come up in which you have only a cursory interest, and you form your judgment on the basis of the opinions you hold about the people who DO care enough to look into it. As to the famous Killian memos, when Little Green Footballs crowed that they were obvious forgeries, it meant nothing to me. But when BruceR of Flit says it, I consider the case closed in the absence of some serious proof the other way.

I will say that the "surround" accompanying these memos appears to be every bit as dodgy as Saddam Hussein's order form for Nigerien yellowcake. How did everybody manage to switch sides so smoothly without colliding in mid-leap?

Flypaper Theory Snares Another Victim - This time it's Gregg Easterbrook. I like the aphorism from one of Joshua Marshall's readers:

this 'fly paper' thesis is like saying we're going to build one super dirty hospital where we can fight the germs on our own terms.

UPDATE: On rereading Easterbrook's closing paragraph, the really sad part jumps out at me: he thought of this all on his own. He seems completely oblivious to the fact that this particular pipe dream started tickling drowsy hawkish brains last year. Finally, a thought, he writes, managing only one accurate word in three.

Don't Be a Blockhead! - Write for the money. If you're a student or untenured junior faculty member, you can enter the Independent Institute's Olive W. Garvey essay contest. This year's theme:

"The great aim of the struggle for liberty has been equality before the law." - F.A. Hayek

Since I am untenured faculty in the school of my second thoughts, I figure I must be eligible to enter both contests.

Tomorrow: Mailbag. Plus Arrival one week late. Tonight: sleep!

Never Let it Be Said . . . that there aren't antisemites who bitch about neoconservative influence. Take Kevin MacDonald, to whose existence I was hipped by Diana Moon. What distinguishes MacDonald from other neocon critics is his eagerness to tie not just ideology but also praxis specifically to Jewish identity, to call it part of a tradition of Jewish manipulation of gentile societies. This stands in sharp distinction from other critics of neoconservatism. It's reassuring to note that googling the major right-wing peacenik sites for MacDonald's name results in either no references or critical ones. (See Lew Rockwell.com, Antiwar.com and The American Conservative.)

Me, I think it's nuts to say (Justin Raimondo) "the neocons did it," let alone (NOT Justin Raimondo) "the neocons did it because they're Jews." Our foreign policy took the turn it did in the last three years because of powerful red-state gentiles, chiefly George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld. Neoconservatives, gentile or Jewish, are blue-staters by residence and habits of mind. Card-carrying neocons were not the decision-makers.

Nor do I accept what appears to be Diana's thesis, that the sole contribution of neoconservative intellectuals to the war effort has been to provide the poetry of democratic rhetoric to the prose of Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld's push to dominate the oil patch. Surely holding important sub-cabinet positions and publishing the political magazines that get shipped by the boxful to the White House each week get you some influence.

In any case, my concern is not with the neoconservatives as individuals so much as with "national greatness conservatism" as an idea. I doubt there's a neocon who doesn't cleave to some version of national greatness conservatism, but it has the backing of important non-neos too - like crony capitalists Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld. "Benevolent hegemony" is, in the end just more of the will "to command and to give orders as to what is to be done." Because Americans are human, it can't reliably be benevolent, and once the bills come due it won't even be hegemony.

Nevertheless, I think Diana's piece makes some important points about attitudes among the vox pop. And it has some intriguing resonances with Juan Cole's Grand Theory:

What was in it for Cheney? I don't think it was a matter of money. At least I hope it wasn't. Cheney sold half his Halliburton stock options in 2000 for $5 million, and it is hard to imagine a man taking his country to war to increase the other half in value by a few million.

I suspect it is political. Not all corporations make money on war. Some actually lose money. But Halliburton, Bechtel and a few other components of the military industrial complex do benefit from war. Strengthening that sector of the American economy strengthens the political Right. Turning the republic into a praetorian state would permanently yield profits for the military industrial complex in such a way as to create a permanent Republican dominance of all the branches of the U.S. government.

In other words, it's a way to spend government money to entrench yourself politically. Democrats tend to play this game with social programs, contemporary Republicans prefer to buy weapons. I remember Chuck Yeager doing a pro-Repubilcan campaign commercial in either 1988 or 1992 admonishing the viewer that When you hear someone calling for defense cuts, that means jobs. In Reagan days, though, Republicans were warier about having actual major wars with all the toys they were buying. Something important has changed since then. It's either the power of ideas ("national greatness"), or simple change in circumstances: with the fall of the Soviet Union, we intervene more promiscuously for the same reason dogs lick their balls (link not work safe, but maybe this post isn't either).

The third thing is, of course, the terrorist atrocities in New York and Washington three years ago. Government officials need to be seen to be "doing something," and a war, wherever, is something. And there's a public demand that something be done, too, and if you can scare the public into thinking some decaying autocracy is going to gas them to death, they'll be all for a war there. Some people never got over the fear the September Massacres occasioned. Not all of them run warblogs.

Anyway, I had a point back there somewhere. But it's late.

110 Stories and a Story - It's always a good time to reread John M. Ford's "110 Stories," but especially today. (Thanks Mary Kay for the reminder.) Also, if less impressively, there's my Shanksville poem. Shanksville prose, too.

90% of this Game is Half Mental - Gary Farber has an article that maintains that hypnosis has physical effects on the brain that explain its effect. I'm familiar with theories, hatched by Skeptical Inquirer people IIRC, that hypnosis is a social phenomenon. That people do what they do under hypnosis because of setting cues. (I'm thinking Susan Blackmore here?) This at first blush seems to contradict that - hey, look, brain effect! - but maybe not. After all, since we have brains, pretty much everything has a brain effect including, presumably, "social phenomena."

But for the purposes of a training journal, what grabs me is this:

Using functional brain imaging, he also found that hypnosis affects an area that controls higher level executive functions.

"This explains why, under hypnosis, people can do outrageous things that ordinarily they wouldn't dream of doing," says Gruzelier, who presented his study at the British Association for the Advancement of Science Festival in Exeter, UK.

What this has me pondering is athletic training as self-hypnosis. If we could study the brainwaves of athletes during an intense set of calisthenics or hard drills, would we find "significantly more brain activity in the anterior cingulate gyrus?" Are real jocks, not late-blooming, short-bus specimens like myself, hypnotizing themselves into top performance with their training rituals? Is this a key distinguisher between top athletes and the rest of us?

I mean, "high suggestibility" would explain a lot . . .

Music Notes - Man, am I having fun with the Lost Highway Records electronic jukebox. (Click on Artist's Entrance and then look for the jukebox icon in the bottom right of the webpage.) It'll either shuffle for you or you can pick songs from a pretty big list of Lost Highway artists. Just got done listening to Johnny Cash and Joe Strummer covering "Redemption Song." I was hoping to find something from Elvis Costello's upcoming The Delivery Man release, finally finding the "Monkey to Man" video. There's a ton of other great stuff at your beck and call, if you like Americana. Pretty much nothing if you don't, but you're on your own then.

UPDATE: And don't miss President Bush singing U2's "Sunday, Bloody Sunday" on another site entirely. (Via Hit & Run.)

What Are You Writing? - It's apparently not a novel about the atrocities of September 11, 2001, or if it is, you're taking your god damn time producing the thing, as Ruth Franklin notes in TNR.

What it demands is a New York novel, a genre that, like the city itself, has reimagined itself countless times over the last two hundred years of American literary history (and produced some of the greatest American novels) but has yet to adapt to the newly altered landscape. This fall brings a few entries in the category, but as far as I can tell, all are removed from the present day. Contemporary New York has become temporarily untouchable. This is a shame, because New York after September 11 had an extraordinary creative energy. Even if it wasn't ultimately long-lasting enough to fuel a cultural eclipse, that devastating, exhausting, energizing time deserves to be remembered.

I see a few possibilities: nobody has achieved the tranquility in which to recollect those emotions; for better or for worse, the novel is not where the present culture's creative energy most naturally flows; Franklin has missed some; books have been submitted, but publishers have thought they sucked; there are a bunch in the pipeline. You pick, or add to the list.

About That Hiatus - Ginger has an excellent explanation of the essential pointlessness of much political blogging.

Plus, once you've been at it for awhile, you find in some cases you might just as well reuse something you wrote a year ago, because it's all you've got to say on the subject.

The Candidates Speaks (sic) - We've got a couple of real gifted orators running for election this time, eh? Consider the latest from John Kerry: "beware of false prophets which come to you in sheep's clothing."

I can see the debates now.

Bush: I'll never stop thinking about ways to harm our country and our people.

Kerry: I'll double the size of US Special Forces in order to conduct terrorist operations.

Bush: Too many OB-GYNs aren't able to practice their love with women all across this country.

Kerry: Beware of false prophets which come to you in sheep's clothing.

Bush: Double the size of our love with women!

Kerry: I'll never stop thinking about special forces dressed as sheep!

Happy Birthday! - To Jesse Walker, author, journalist and all around swell guy, who makes the best chili, gives the best parties and turned 34 yesterday. He will be missed - but hopefully not for a good long time yet. In the meantime, it's great having him around.

On the Jesse Walker front, I should have linked this article last month, but I was on, you know, hiatus.

Music Notes - The Pixies cover Warren Zevon's "Ain't That Pretty at All" and you can listen for free. Via Cakes and Money 2.0. Never my favorite Zevon song, but fun. From the forthcoming tribute album.

Anarchy, State and Blogtopia - Interesting discussion of the pros and cons of libertarian anarchism versus minarchism (advocacy of the "night-watchman state") bounced last week between Arthur Silber and Roderick Long. I am pretty sure that Arthur is right that "the arguments in favor of a version of libertarian anarchism are notably more consistent" than the arguments for minarchism, but disagree that "most of the arguments against anarchism simply don't hold up, as Roderick demonstrates by dealing with the major objections one by one."

As a minarchist/constitutionalist, I'll cop to inconsistency of principle. But while I agree with the anarcho-capitalists that All governments are gangs, I don't think governments are the only gangs. It's an observed fact that, wherever and whenever you go, armed groups will gather to dispossess people of the fruits of their labor, because it's easier than working, or at least more fun. Long waves off the idea that the "private protection agencies" beloved of anarcho-capitalists might go rogue as unlikely, but how unlikely is something that has happened everywhere at all times - the strong setting themselves in power over the weak? Long seems to think that few protection agencies would want to incur the extra costs of regularly engaging in violence for gain, but the gain is fabulous - an absolute right to arrogate to yourself any of the wealth in your zone of control that you choose and to redistribute whatever amount of it you deem efficacious to whomever will most cement your lock on power. That's quite the main chance to have one's eye on.

This of course sounds like what we have now, but it's worse than that because unsettled. Under constitutionalism you know which gang will hold sway and you can, equivocally and temporarily, befuddle them with trickery - tedious procedural bindings that minimize their discretion while still allowing enough of a taste of the power they crave to make it seem worth it, to them, to comply. It never works for long and our own Gulliver has been slipping bond after bond for some time now. The general welfare clause seems, in retrospect, the trojan horse of the Constitution. But the bigger mistake was the founders' faith in "checks and balances" in the context of "separation of powers."

The idea behind checks and balances under separation of powers is the restraint of mutual jealousy - each of the three branches will be so zealous of its prerogatives, and so wary of overreaching by the other branches, as to want to keep the other two in line. This has proven spectacularly ineffective in practice and in retrospect it's not hard to see why.

Imagine a totalitarian society where "all that is not forbidden is required." Every aspect of life falls under the purview of government, with approximately a third of life each under the sway of the legislature, the executive and the judiciary. In such a circumstance, any gain in power by one branch entails a loss of power by at least one other. The other branch is highly motivated to defend its turf. One of those branches directly commands the armories and the other two don't but let's not sweat that detail. In that polity, you could indeed see each branch vigorously checking the power of the other two. Of course, in that polity, it does you and me no good, because we are not "free" in any aspect of life - the only question is which of three institutions exercises absolute control over it.

The problem is that the same incentives toward vigorous checking and balancing don't apply to (initially) limited government. Under limited government there is some territory of our lives (social, political, economic, esthetic) under the sway of one or more branches of government, and a theoretically larger region that is unclaimed territory. There we have liberty. The problem is, if one branch of government decides to make inroads into the unclaimed territory, it is not necessarily impinging on the prerogatives of another branch. Since the other branch is not directly threatened, it need not vigorously resist the assault. Indeed, where would be the profit in exerting itself to turn back the onslaught simply to restore the status quo ante - the end result is that sphere of life regains its ungoverned status and the branch that exerted itself accrues no gain in its own power and privilege at all. All it may have done is ticked off the other branch and motivated it to make an assault on some power the "checking" branch does hold. Now if the checking branch dislodges the original malefactor and sticks around, it has gained something, but the result for the citizen is the same - what was under the sphere of liberty has fallen under the sphere of (some branch of) government.

Far easier and more profitable, from a power, status and bureaucratic perpetuation standpoint, for each branch to nibble at separate regions of the unregulated sphere. If the government was truly limited initially, it can take quite some time until the branches come into unavoidable conflict. And when they do, they have options beyond simply checking and balancing each other. They can arrive at modi vivendi that beat zealously opposing the other branches at the margin.

The incoherence of the "checks and balances" approach to limited government is that the problem it identifies - governmental institutions are fundamentally self-interested - it can only solve if government agencies are also either paradoxically selfless or unreasoningly spiteful. Faced with a conflict between the people and the Executive, the Legislature must either identify with the people or hate the Executive with such instinct that it never stops to consider How can I make this deal work for me? In real life, the average legislator has his eye on a job in the executive, the average jurist needs the legislator's favor to get his next, cushier appointment, the average executive functionary plays golf and sleeps with members of the other two branches. A strong class consciousness binds the three "warring" branches into a commonality of interest.

And, in the end, so much for limited government. Just as democracy "can only exist until a majority of voters discover that they can vote themselves largess out of the public treasury," a constitutional republic can only exist until its governmental components figure out the loopholes in its charter. A country where the legislature votes on a far-reaching piece of internal security legislation without insisting on time to even read it is pretty well along in that process. I'll miss the place.

But this item was supposed to be a critique of anarchism, wasn't it? Gosh but these things happen. Point being, as Philip Marlowe concludes Raymond Chandler's The Long Goodbye,

I never saw any of them again--except the cops. No way has yet been invented to say goodbye to them.

Which is to say, governments are inevitable because gangs are inevitable. I'm not saying we should lie back and enjoy them. Rather, baffle them with our bullshit as long as we can, and wish the next guy better luck. He has our failures for his school.

(P.S. See this old Procrastination comment thread.)

Loco Parentis Redux - Conservatives and libertarians alike cherished P.J. O'Rourke's hilarious demoltion of Hillary Clinton's It Takes a Village, which began (in slight paraphrase), "The government is the village. You are the child."

Comes now Mr. Andrew Card, White House Chief of Staff in the administration of President George W. Bush (R),

in a speech to Republican delegates from Maine and Massachusetts that was threaded with references to Bush's role as protector of the country. Republicans have sounded that theme repeatedly at the GOP convention as they discuss the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and the war in Iraq.

''It struck me as I was speaking to people in Bangor, Maine, that this president sees America as we think about a 10-year-old child," Card said. ''I know as a parent I would sacrifice all for my children."

So, all you Republican Party Reptiles out there, could you at least gag a little on your way to the voting booth?

The Girl Who Wasn't There - Diana Moon and Avedon Carol see Mary Cheney where she isn't.

Diana: "This has nothing to do with gay right, by the way. It has everything to do with being a mensch."

Avedon: "I cannot imagine a time in my life, no matter how angry my parents were with any one of us, that they would have deliberately excluded one of us from a family presentation."

I find myself thinking about the fourth episode of Sapphire & Steel for some reason, with the faceless guy who lives just on the edge of every photograph ever taken and can get you if you've ever made the mistake of appearing in one.

Ken Layne is a God to Me - From "What Conservatives?":

And no, I'm not claiming to be a Goldwater Conservative. Like the overwhelming majority of voters -- that 60-70% in the middle of the Political Spectrum -- I simply believe it is reasonable to demand a government that practices restraint in all matters. You know, like staying the hell out of our private lives, not taxing us to death, not spending money it doesn't have, and not sending our troops off on ridiculous & doomed adventures dreamed up by a bunch of dingbats in some back room conducting foreign policy like geeks playing Dungeons & Dragons.

Okay, it's unfair to Dungeons and Dragons players, most of whom really can tell the difference between their campaign and real life, even if they prefer the former. Otherwise, spot on. And thereafter:

If you feel like it, please explain this weirdness. I'll ask that you not use the "But it will be so much worse under Kerry," because you know that isn't true. There is no way in hell a Republican-controlled Congress (or a split Congress) and a Democrat in the White House will spend a fraction of what the one-party government of 2000-2004 has spent. A gridlocked federal government will not engage in wild misadventures, or the creation of giant new bureaucracies and cabinet-level departments as it has under Bush and the GOP-controlled Congress.

There's a HELL of a lot more where that came from. See also the magisterial "Terror Twilight."

The Most Wonderful Time of the Year - Arrival Day is coming round again, and Jonathan "Head Heeb" Edelstein is coordinating another Arrival Day blogburst. Just as, on Saint Patrick's Day, everyone is Irish, on Arrival Day we all get to be Jewish, at least on our blogs. You can read last year's blogburst entries to get in the mood, including my appreciation of the Jewish-American contribution to the development of the comic book. Jonathan writes

as before, both Jews and non-Jews are welcome to take part. I ask only that the entries touch somehow on Jews, Judaism, Jewish thought, perceptions of Jews or interaction between Jews and gentiles. Because this year is the 350th anniversary of the American Jewish community, I also ask - although I won't require - that the essays focus on a common theme: the Jewish future.