Who Was That? - Robert Gates wrote and Zbigniew Brzezinski has confirmed that the United States began aid to the anticommunist (and muslim fundamentalist) Afghan resistance in mid-1979, before the Soviet invasion and coup. Brzezinski says he told President Jimmy Carter that he thought the aid would bring about an intervention by the Soviets, that it was, as he wrote Carter when it finally happened, "the opportunity to give the USSR its war of Vietnam." So Brzezinski told Le Nouvel Observatour, whose website combines unreadable design with some kind of foreign dialect, so read the translation here.

Lefties and some anti-interventionist righties have pointed to the Brzezinski interview as proving the original sin that led to the September massacres. Unqualified Offerings felt and still feels that mujahedin aid was so much sauce for the gander. But between the "Brzezinski is a glory hog" stories and the "Brzezinski was such a meanie to the poor Soviets" diatribes, someone is being left out.

Jimmy Carter. If the stories of Brzezinski and Gates are correct, Carter authorized aid to the Afghan resistance in the summer of 1979 on the basis of arguments that it would draw Soviet soldiers into a bloody, debilitating trap. Jimmy Carter made the decision to "give the USSR its war of Vietnam" - that is, a decade and more of death, dissension and defeat. This was the President praised or damned for the "inordinate fear of communism" speech and SALT II, for whom the "killer rabbit" incident symbolized the haplessness and ineffectuality that Republicans charged gave us the Iranian Hostage Crisis. In the Republican history of the United States, Jimmy Carter gave us malaise and weakness because he thought the United States could go through the world being nice. At the same time, Carter's defenders, from Miller Williams on the left to Thomas Fleming on the right have praised Carter on the grounds that He Kept Us Out of War.

Don't the Afghan resistance revelations mean we have to completely revise our image of Carter as President? Say what you will about the morality and sense of the decision to aid the Afghan resistance: there was nothing of niceness in it. You had to be, and Unqualified Offerings means this in the nicest possible way, a real son of a bitch to make that call. Carter signed the order to aid the Afghan resistance a month after signing the never-ratified SALT II. Indeed, the Soviet invasion that his decision precipitated essentially killed SALT II. (He also, it should be said, baited the soft trap of Helsinki. Critics accused his administration of ratifying the Soviet Empire, when what he actually did was give Warsaw Pact dissidents a place to stand, leaving it to them to provide the levers.)

One other character trait of Carter's comes through the revised history too: an extraordinary self-possession. While he largely lost the 1980 election on Iran and stagflation, there was quite a lot of Who Lost Afghanistan? and "soft on communism" in the mix too. How tempted was Carter to shout, "Soft on Communism? Lost Afghanistan? Do you know what I just did???"

He destroyed the Soviet Union. And he never said a word.

You Can't Tell the Players... - Scathing and frequently hilarious critique of Noam Chomsky by - Justin Raimondo.

Cooking with Unqualified Offerings - More playoffs this weekend, including tomorrow's Good vs. Evil matchup in which the Pittsburgh Steelers defend all that is beautiful, true and good from the Baltimore Ravens. Naturally, a man's thoughts turn to snacks.

For the diet conscious, Unqualified Offerings recommends the snack system of its sister - Baked Lays potato chips dipped in salsa. Far better than Lays' baked tortilla chips and salsa, actually.

But this piece deals with an example of market failure so dire that one can hardly believe Paul Krugman hasn't addressed it yet: commercial chex mix. UO grew up eating its mommy's chex mix, and was dumbfounded when General Mills brought out the bagged stuff and it had - no nuts. This probably has to do with the sudden development of lethal peanut allergies in every third American child just around the time of the first Clinton inaugural. (Accident? Coincidence? Conspiracy???) General Mills now also markets a "peanut lovers" bag, but there are still two major problems:

1. "Traditional" chex mix is peanut chex mix!
2. So-called Peanut Lovers Chex Mix doesn't actually have many peanuts in it.

The first problem can only be solved by radical campaign finance reform: A search of opensecrets.org reveals that General Mills made a single $2500 donation to the NRCC in March 2000. No doubt this largesse has allowed them to flout product labelling regulations the way they have.

The second problem is clearly regulatory failure too - the country needs a caring federal government to fight for the peanut-loving little guy by setting minimum peanut content rules for supposed peanut products. Until that happy day, however, Unqualified Offerings provides its readers the following recipe:

Ingredients: One bag Traditional Chex Mix One can spanish peanuts

Preparation:
Open the bag of chex mix.
Open the can of peanuts.
Pour peanuts into chex mix bag.
Hold bag closed at top and shake.

Serving Suggestion:
Crunch vigorously (and loudly) during Summerall and Madden's frequent senior moments.

Sorry, I Forgot to Care about the "plight of the Palestinians" again. It is true, as Scott McConnell notes, that "from the time of [Israel's] very founding, there have been important Israelis (and not only in the Likud Party) who aspired to expand Israel to what they called its 'natural borders,' who wished to ethnically cleanse the Palestinians whose lands they coveted." And it is true that "during the Oslo peace process, which was supposed to lead to the creation of a Palestinian state, the Israelis increased the number of settlements, and all the access roads and checkpoints which go with them, by roughly one-third," and that the supposedly magnanimous Barak plan would have made a mockery of the territorial integrity of Palestine by leaving settlements, checkpoints and Jewish-only roads intact.

So the Palestinians attack a kid's party.

Now if I were a good anti-idiotaran, I would believe that "There's no longer any such thing as a 'civilian.' This idea is actually a quite modern one, and it is now obsolete." Presumably massacring bat mitzvah-goers would not bother me. Maybe my parents shouldn't have let me watch the unsporting parts of the Munich Olympics when I was twelve. Too late now.

Its apologists call terrorism the weapon of the weak. Give the Palestinians F-16s, they say, and they'll happily drop as many bombs as any rich nation, and who can doubt that they would? Weak combatants must use the weapons at hand against targets they can reach. Okay. Let's give them that much. The range of available targets in a highly militarized country like Israel is large - soldiers on patrol, soldiers in trucks, checkpoints, barracks, depots. Respect the division of labor - some people take/are assigned the job of killing and dying for their countrymen. Heck, assassinate government officials if you're determined to have a guerrilla campaign. All of these things are possible with stealth, guile and small arms. They might even be effective, weakening the resolve of the ordinary soldier and the decision-maker class alike.

But no, it's kids' parties.

In Tulkarem, about a dozen Al Aqsa Brigades militants marched through the streets after the attack, shooting into the air in celebration.

No doubt the air itself deserved its punishment.

Wilderness of Radios - Ken Goldstein runs a blog called The Illuminated Donkey, which reminded Unqualified Offerings of the Democratic Party somehow, so it shied away. In fact, Goldstein's chief crime is participating with Justin Slotman in an act of sports woofing so heinous that UO, cross-eyed with rage, mistakenly asked Andy Kashdan to fuck off and die in private correspondence because it lost track of just which fine blog contained the offending item. Unqualified Offerings will travel next month to Africa to apologize to Andy Kashdan.

Goldstein's blog is actually quite good! He's been following the Case of the Non-Missing Radio as closely as anyone, critiquing today's AP report on his site, and sending a link to the far less confused New York Post version of the story by e-mail. Goldstein (presumably no relation to the pseudonymous Emmanuel Goldstein, unless you can be pseudonymously related) muses:

A private pilot staying one floor below Higazy, who had no knowledge of either the case or Higazy, inquired about his missing aviation radio, at which point investigators questioned the hotel employee who had originally discovered the radio. According to the Times, "On Wednesday morning, the case fell apart completely. Agents reinterviewed the hotel employee and he said he recalled finding the radio on a table in Mr. Higazy's room, not in the safe."

So this case might be a simple mistake, an investigative screwup, a plant by an attention-seeking hotel employee, or something else entirely. I'm guessing that the FBI isn't finished talking to that hotel employee.

This site would be untrue to itself if it forebore baseless speculation about this kind of thing. You have a well-connected (diplomat dad) Egyptian air corps veteran who, at 30, is just getting ready to start graduate school. He tells the media he wants to get his Master's because master's degree in computers "makes me a big shot [back home in Egypt],'' but he's enough of a big shot already that when his student lodging falls through he stays in a Hilton for almost three weeks before buildings fall on it. (Rooms are not currently available at the Millenium Hilton, but other NYC Hilton's seem to be in the $150-and-up range.

Or: Let's face it: it could all be just like they say. All sorts of people pass through New York. Coincidences happen.

Note: You can see some nice pictures of different styles of aviation transceivers on the official Icom America site. Not all of them look like the sort of thing a random hotel worker would identify as an aviation transceiver.

Blatant Meme Insertion Attempt - Instapundit, Viceroy of Araby.

Does This Fit? - Matt Welch writes, more politely than Unqualified Offerings necessarily deserves, to say he likes being called a "muscular liberal," but points out that many of its criticisms of uberhawk blogdom do not apply to him:

I've never supported war against Iraq, and in fact have spent some energy trying to figure out the whole sanctions mess. Nor did I ever assert an Iraq connection to 9-11, which seemed strained from Day One. Nor have I actually supported bringing the war anywhere else, though I guess I'm very tentatively in favor of the theory of sending small squads to troublespots like Somalia or The Philippines (I haven't really thought about it, to tell you the truth). My neocon linking has been limited, I believe, to a bit of Mark Steyn here and there, Victor Davis Hanson once, and Andrew Sullivan quite a few times -- I'm not fond of NRO & the like, and I will soon unsubscribe from the OpinionJournal newsletter, for reasons of allergy to partisanship. I'm actually not so interested in the "cultivation of national resolve" for its own sake, though I've found it appropriate in the Afghan War, and in the aggressive puncturing of long-nurtured bullshit arguments & beliefs on all points of the political spectrum. My recent Big Idea, clumsily elucidated here, is for the U.S. to take every opportunity to transfer responsibility worldwide to individual countries and regions, and thus begin to reduce the Empire (while forcing political & military maturity upon other countries). If we make the Empire as virtuous as possible, while reducing it wherever opportunity strikes, we will reduce our Scapegoat Risk, avoid some corrupting temptations of power, and have money to do other stuff.

However, this still leaves unrefuted Unqualified Offerings' claim that Welch, um, has a blog.

I apologize to Matt Welch: I mischaracterized his views. (And I invite him to join Unqualified Offerings in spreading the "Best [Neocon-Approved Items] of the Web" meme...)

There's a Reason for That - Over at Airstrip One, Emmanuel Goldstein regrets that "Justin Raimondo goes on about warblogs. Doesn't mention that one of his columnists actually runs a web log. Oh well." But surely he knows his own editor. Giving his writer pub would complicate his typically manichean picture - it would mean acknowledging that there are bloggers out there - and more than one - that are not reflexively interventionist and unstintingly enthusiastic for the widest possible war. It's the kind of thing that makes Raimondo easier to dismiss than he should wish to be.

An Open Letter to Perry de Havilland - Hi Perry: Thank you for your note about my brief mention of the Justin Raimondo versus the Warbloggers affair. Of all the blog responses to Raimondo's essay, yours most struck me, which makes sense, given what you have noted as our incipient mutual admiration society. I have some issues with what you wrote though, detailed at tedious length hereafter. It amounts to a qualified defense of Raimondo. (No other kind is possible.) I've been reading Raimondo and Antiwar.com for much of its existence, so what follows is not just based on a handful of Google results since Wednesday morning.

What Samizdata Illuminatus calls "dogpiling" is the word! However, you folks seem to be giving the uberhawk blogs themselves a pass so far, which I'm not inclined to do. And I would have thought that Samizdata of all places would understand the frustrations that send Raimondo "Over the Top" (in Natalie Solent's apt formulation) in the first place - he has "metacontext" issues too. You and I both know how purely infuriating it is to have to clear statist brush every morning before starting to build the house of your argument, knowing that it will just be reseeded overnight. Some libertarians manage to remain pleasant through all of it - Virginia Postrel and Stephen Cox come to mind - while others take to filling their rhetorical chainsaws with the fuel of bitterness. If you caught Raimondo in a reflective moment (assuming he has them...), I suspect he would tell you that an imperialist metacontext drives him absolutely batshit.

Now, there are real criticisms to make against the Rothbardian anti-interventionists and you hit them: a tendency to give Other People's Collectivism a free pass, an automatic disbelief of any (home) government claim that becomes reflexive and unthinking rather than critical, and an impulse to dismiss all dangers short of outright conquest as insufficient to justify a military response. To all of those, add a weakness for character assassination in place of, well, reason.

There's been an awful lot of "So's your your old man" in the blog community's response to Raimondo's screed. (Natalie Solent actually points out, politely, some of the blind alleys down which the bloggers have wandered. ) Yours was something of an exception. Solent is right that Raimondo is "OTT." The question is, Over the Top of what. My answer is: over the top of a position of considerable salience. The bulwarks of that position would be

o A "warblog" groupthink as claustrophobic as that of any faculty lounge, in which a particular community makes a sport of coming up with new countries to attack and more colorful denunciations of soft targets than their fellows. ("Here are links to eighteen new dismissals of Stephanie Salter!") This group comprises most of the self-described anti-idiotarians. (Alas, I was mulling the outlines of an anti-"anti-idiotarian" - the term - piece when Raimondo preempted the effort.)

Am I too hard on these people? Perry, let's consider whether some recent blog action fits into your "aggressive defender" paradigm. Warbloggers have noted, as an example of Saudi perfidy, reports that the Kingdom is making attempts to reach a diplomatic accomodation with Iraq. This is added to the list of reasons why "we" should toss the bums out and "secure"....(do we say "their" or "our"?) oil reserves. But wait! Supposedly, our only purpose for having troops in Saudi Arabia is to defend the Kingdom from being attacked by Saddam Hussein. An accomodation theoretically means the kingdom is safer and we can free ourselves of that burden. Now add in a Reynolds piece from yesterday about how we should not only refuse to accomodate the Kingdom's pathetic misogyny: "Another reader suggests that we should rub the Saudis' noses in this, making armed women soldiers as visible as possible, having them man check points that Saudi drivers (all men, of course) must pass through, letting their long hair escape from their helmets, etc." Reynolds offers no disapproval. Perry, this is the mindset of an occupier, not a defender. Put these two together and you've demolished the pretext that the US is in Saudi Arabia as part of a defensive alliance - if you think this way, the US is in Saudi Arabia because it is a platform for attacking Iraq, whether Iraq particularly wants to attack the Saudis or the Saudis particularly want to attack Iraq or not.

We are compadres and familiar with each other's writing, so I will skip linking to my own pieces criticizing the Saudis, and for that matter, criticizing Raimondo's impulsive defenses of them. Lost between Raimondo's apologias and Charles Johnson's incitements is the idea that we might just tell the Saudis to fuck off and fend for themselves. If the sand around their precious holy places is so sacrosanct, may they have much joy in it.

The cheerleader blogs, whether libertarian sympathizers like Reynolds and den Beste or muscular liberals like Layne, have completely accomodated themselves to the aims of the "National Greatness" conservatives. These folks have long since given up the pretext that Iraq was actually behind the attacks on the United States. The National Greatness types want war on Iraq for reasons of supposed prophylaxis and for the cultivation of national (that would be collectivist, my libertarian friend) resolve. Note that the cheerleaders seized on every hint of an Iraqi connection in October, usually by citing items in the neocon press. When the utter lack of evidence for Iraqi involvement became overwhelming, they switched reasons for attacking Iraq, but none of them ever acknowledged that they had been too credulous in their earlier assumptions, nor did any of them notably reflect that maybe there was a larger lesson to be drawn about the reliability of their neocon confreres. (Neoconfreres?)

I've got to tell you, Perry, I get infuriated too. What we have is, on one side, Rothbardians arguing that prophylactic war is incompatible with limited government. On the other, self-described "anti-idiotarians" who claim to believe that it is. The identity of the actual idiots here is less clear to me than it is to some others. When you factor in the Rothbardians' least tenable thesis - that "aggressive defense" can never be anything but a smokescreen for imperialism - neither side seems to brim with promise.

o The absolute dysfunction of "split screen" Republicanism - the Sullivan/Barone "We do the National Greatness Stuff abroad and the leave us alone stuff at home." Recent Sullivan pieces complained how Bush was devoting too much rhetorical energy to tax cuts and fiscal prudence when he needed to, er, focus like a laser beam on what is, for Sullivan, a practically limitless war. You know and I know that the Parties of Way WAY Bigger Government (our Democrats and your Labour) can only be held off by expenditure of furious political and rhetorical energy. Bush is the only effective communicator the Republican Party has - its congressional leadership comes straight from the Island of Misfit Toys. To the extent that he remains "above the fray," the fray goes to the ultrastatists. And every expansion of the target list is an additional assault on the budget. Toppling the remaining Ayatollahs in Iran is a fiscal luxury item.

Can you name a "warblogger" in the Official Constellation who has demurred at any of the proposed interventions on the table? This gets to both the groupthink issue and the utter abandonment of small-r republican prudence.

I happen to consider myself an "aggressive defender" in your scheme. I fully support a Don't Tread on Me war against al-Qaeda and its auxiliaries (like the Taliban). I increasingly worry that that is not the war we are fighting, and I am certain that that's not the war the cheerleader blogs want to fight. One odd thing is that, while Raimondo now describes himself as having "opposed this war," he was the very one who coined "Kill the Bastards - and Get Out" as a motto. I still support that war, though I feel a little guilty that it appears that one of the ways we would get it is leaving your countrymen behind to deal with the truck bombs and snipers. I would respectfully suggest that the prospect is worth at least as much of your energy as Justin Raimondo is.

Best,

Jim

UPDATE: I have edited out a reference to Matt Welch from this piece, after an e-mail convinced me I was wrong to include him. The original text read "muscular liberals like Layne and Welch..." I stand by the rest of what I wrote.

Let's Try That Again - Virginia Postrel informs me that the Postrel-linking method discussed below does not work in her browser and therefore may not work in others, either. For maximum compatibility, open the source, find the achor name then build the URL as follows:

"http://www.dynamist.com/scene.html#[anchorname]"

Wilderness of...Fires - Per a report in the Hindustan Times, an office fire yesterday nearly gutted an office building in Islamabad that "housed offices of 21 ministries, government departments, including offices of the Interior Ministry and the main offices of Pakistan's Intelligence Bureau." Authorities are saying short-circuit but "they did not rule out other causes." The article references unsourced speculation that Interior Ministry records on recently-banned militant Islamist groups were destroyed in the fire. Not to worry, says a Pakistani government spokesman: "only some old records of the Interior Ministry were lost. He said there had been no confidential records of religious and Jehadi organisations or of the Taliban in the building."

He might even be telling the truth. (link via Antiwar.Com, if anyone's heard of them...)

No Comprende It's a Riddle - The strange case of the "Egyptian radio" gets a little stranger, though not, apparently, to the Associated Press's way of thinking. In a baffling litte item in today's papers, we are told

Charges have been dropped against the Egyptian graduate student accused of lying to federal investigators about an aviation radio found in his hotel room near the World Trade Center, a U.S. attorney's office spokesman said Wednesday.

Another hotel guest came forward after Abdallah Higazy was charged this week and told officials the radio belonged to him, said Marvin Smilon, a spokesman for the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York.

Prosecutors had accused Higazy, the son of an Egyptian diplomat, of interfering with the investigation into the Sept. 11 attack, which demolished the trade center towers and killed about 2,900 people.

Higazy had insisted in two rounds of FBI interviews that he knew nothing of the hand-held radio found in a safe in his room along with his Egyptian passport, a copy of the Quran and a gold medallion, prosecutors had said.

Unqualified Offerings finds itself with a couple of questions after reading this item:

1) So an aviation radio really was present in this New York hotel-room safe at the time of the attacks, correct? That part of the original story doesn't seem to have changed.
2) Who was this other hotel guest who claimed the radio? What nationality? What connections to anyone's government?
3) How did he get the radio into Higazy's room safe?
4) Have "prosecutors" asked the man these questions? Where is he now?
5) Did AP ask the prosecutors the above things? (If not, why not?)
6) Did they answer?
7) Isn't that part of the story too, if they did or didn't?

Let's You And Him Fight - Unqualified Offerings has alternately praised and kicked around Justin Raimondo and Instapundit for most of its history. Now they have decided to cut out the middleman, with Raimondo attacking - intemperately as always - the warbloggers and Instapundit deflecting - glibly as so often - Raimondo's actual arguments. Reynolds somewhat more directly addresses Rothbardian right wing interventionism in a general way in Updates added to the original post in later hours. It would be nice if Raimondo similarly modulated his warblog complaints, though modulation is not what he is into.

In a way, Raimondo makes it too easy for his critics. He tends to add that extra half twist of outrage that vitiates the nub of his arguments. But his targets in this case, the self-identified Anti-Idiotarians, don't cover themselves in glory by seizing on that escape hatch. I see a lot more enthusiasm for gang-stomping Barbara Kingsolver one more time than for responding to less dismissible doves like Alan Bock and Scott McConnell on the right and Robert Wright on the left. A couple of weeks ago, Reynolds averred that he didn't attack the likes of Wright precisely because he recognized that Wright's arguments against the war were different in character and sophistication from Stephanie Salter's. Which is all well and good. But what he hasn't done - and as an Instapundit junkie, Unqualified Offerings would have seen it - is make any effort to refute Wright's better class of war policy criticism.

Raimondo, for his part, falls way too often into the trap of defending whatever the Uberhawks criticise, no matter how appalling it actually is. He just can't get over how mean people are about Saudi Arabia. Justin, dude! You're missing a "Let's declare victory and get out!" opportunity! Don't say "The Saudis are misunderstood targets of a smear campaign." The Saudis are conniving rat bastards. Say, "The neocons have finally admitted that the Saudi princelings we've spent so much ammo, treasure and dignity defending are conniving rat bastards. So let's pull out of their Shitty Big Country and let them drown in their sands of their own corruption. As a bonus, it leaves the bin-Laden brigade one less excuse to bamboozle alienated dipshits into slaughtering themselves and us." It practically writes itself!

(Unqualified Offerings' cunning plan in all of this is for the A-list pundits to kill each other off, leaving us Bs and Cs to rule the ruins!)

Marty We Wish We Hardly Knew Ye - Frequently-insightful liberal* sports columnist Tom Boswell of the Post is unaccountably impressed with now-departed Redskin coach Marty Schottenheimer's being impressed with himself.

"In this business, there are two roads," Schottenheimer said after being fired as the Redskins' coach despite winning eight of his last 11 games in his first year. "The only one I know is the high road."

So, he proceeded to take it.

Uh, Tom - Unqualified Offerings' mother taught it that the actual high road is marked so well that people should know you are on it without your telling them. In fact, if you find yourself telling people about how you're taking the high road, or that, ye gods! it's the only road you know, you probably ain't anywhere near it. This was the most appalling thing about Schottenheimer's tenure, really: the man just couldn't shut up about his virtues. Let him do it somewhere else.

*In keeping with recent AndrewSullivan.com practice, Unqualified Offerings wants to label everybody. And in Boswell's case, the shoe fits.

Libertarianism and my Sister, Continued - I appreciate the e-mails about "The Citizen or the Police," below. A couple of them made me realize some gaps need filling:

1) On sisters and abortion arrests, I left one out: Would you agree that your sister should be jailed for performing an abortion?

I mean, if she were a doctor...

2) Someone pointed out that almost the exact same piece could be called "Why I Am Not a Conservative." This is entirely true. Needless to say, I'm okay with that.

Be the Second on Your Block - That's right, fellow bloggers! You too can link to specific Virginia Postrel items just like Unqualified Offerings does, such as this one with the latest news from the Dallas fake drug scandal. Even though there are no visible anchor links when viewing the page, if you choose View Source, you'll find a secret anchor tag before each item. Your link becomes "http://www.vpostrel.com#[anchorname]."

The Citizen or the Police - Or, Why I Am Not a Liberal.

Many years ago I spent an evening chatting up the night clerk at the desk of a motel on the edge of Harper's Ferry, West Virginia. She was a married, born-again Christian mother, we neither of us had anything else to do that evening and it was pleasant to talk. It was she who brought up abortion, almost as if merely mentioning the subject did not risk comity. I take pro-lifers seriously even though I am not one. If you accept that a fetus has the status of a person, and there are reasons of both faith and prudence to do so, then opposing abortion becomes a necessity. That I don't come down on that side myself does not make it absurd that others do.

But this item isn't about abortion, it's about guns. Really, all political arguments are about guns, which is why Harper's Ferry is a good place to have one. For five years it was our Beirut, changing hands dozens of times between Fort Sumter and Appomattox. The town proper occupies a spit of lowland and a hillside in the fork that the Potomac makes with the Shenandoah - a spit and a hillside lower than the ridge across the river, which is a bad thing during years when people are cannon-oriented. Whenever the Confederates took the town, the Union pounded it from the Maryland hill; when the Union took the town, the Confederates pounded it from the West Virginia hill, though you can bet they didn't think of it as "West Virginia."

Nor did the locals lack rooting interests of their own. The townsfolk and country people thereabouts bitterly - and lethally - divided between pro-Union and pro-Confederate sympathies. There were spies, saboteurs, partisans, guerrillas. Terrorists, to come down to it. Let your gaze wander from the carefully focused historical spotlight, beyond the Army of Northern Virginia and the Army of the Potomac, the almost-nobility of Chickamauga and brutal-but-straightforward Vicksburg, and you notice places - Missouri, Kentucky, the Shenandoah - where our civil war looks a lot like everyone else's: terror, fire, reprisal, hanging, burning, bushwhacking and the discarding of those sentimental categories, bystander and prisoner.

But I was talking about abortion. (I know, I said I was talking about guns. Trust me, I am still talking about guns.) That evening in Harper's Ferry, I explained to the night clerk that, Yes, I could see why someone would be against abortion. But didn't she hear what Dan Quayle had said in response to the ambush question about his daughter during the recent debate? I wasn't wild about abortion either; but I wouldn't agree that my sister should go to jail for trying to have one, nor with jailing the doctor who performed the abortion my sister chose. And if I wasn't willing to subject my own sister to that, why should I be able to subject other people's sisters to that?

There are all kinds of libertarians, which sort of sucks, since maybe if there were fewer we'd amount to something politically. There are anarcho-capitalists, who believe that the market can and should provide all goods including defense; Constitutionalists, who believe that the federal government must contract to fit the enumerated powers as understood before FDR browbeat the Supreme Court into agreeing that Sure, it was up to the federal government whether a man could grow his own wheat to feed his own livestock; minarchists, who support the so-called Night Watchman State, that provides for the common defense and protects against violent crime and fraud and is otherwise nowhere to be found; "pragmatic libertarians" who, when not winning oxymoron contests, argue for maximizing liberty on the grounds that experience shows that freedom makes people happier, more efficient and less quarrelsome; "principled libertarians" who argue for maximizing liberty because rights come from Our Creator or are deducible from elementary postulates of self-ownership. I am a "my sister" libertarian.

Nobody worth performing the Heimlich Maneuver on is going to tell the police they saw their sister smoking pot. Am I okay with my sister going to jail if she sells some pills or her favors? Do I think my sister or brother should be dragged into court if she drains her field or he hires too many people of the wrong color? No. So I have no business supporting a regime that subjects other people's siblings to those things. Would I have to agree that if my sister drowned my niece, or my brother defrauded credit card companies or my mother burned down her building for the insurance, that they should be subject to arrest and imprisonment. Yes, I'm afraid. And a note to you smartypants readers: Not all of the examples in this item have been hypotheticals. So I really do mean it.

Which brings us back to guns - not the guns that citizens might or might not own, but the ones the State most definitely does. Behind every law is a weapon. That goes for all the nice regulatory laws too. Sure, it's only "civil proceedings," but try telling them to tie a tail and a string to their civil proceedings and run into a headwind and its the sherrifs and marshalls who come round to uphold "the majesty of the law." Which ends up in the same place the criminal law does - jail or, if you take the armed fugitive route, death. "Contempt of Court" - dissing da judge - is the thing that judges will lock you up for indefinitely, and on their own say-so, and try checking and balancing that if you don't like it. They don't ask you to go politely, either. It's sherrifs and marshalls time again. For the system to survive, resistance must prove futile. Even the most "innocuous" law has, potentially, the entire weight of the State and the State's monopoly on the legitimate use of violence behind it. I can bitch about the Ravens' stadium deal, but watch what happens if I keep my share in protest and get stubborn.

Frost wrote, "...Before I'd build a wall / I'd ask who I was walling in or out." Before I'd pass a law, I'd ask who might get shot. My purpose is not to argue that "we" can afford an optional system of laws or courts that one can opt out of if one chooses. After all, Frost would and did build walls if he got the right answer to those questions, and I would pass laws if I got the right answer to mine. My purpose is to note the stakes.

Brian Linse kindly observed that he wished I would address some issues I originally left aside when I waded into the Interblog Gun Wars. That is sort of what I am doing in this item. The liberals in the colloquy, Ginger Stampley, Charles Dodgson and Brian, were all good about noting the sorts of police abuses that the libertarians in the argument imagined an armed citizenry could successfully defend against. Charles has made a minor specialty of pointing out police and FBI abuses. The big story in Dallas, Virginia Postrel notes, is "cases involved alleged drug buys during which narcotics officers could not see or hear their paid informant conducting the transactions" and the drugs seized turned out to be crushed wallboard. The police power is a necessary power, but boy is it dangerous.

This is the core problem with contemporary liberalism: liberals can be very good at noting the dangers of police power (though they used, present company excepted, to be a lot better at it); but the liberal program of strengthening the regulatory state amounts to turning more and more of life into police business. Here in Montgomery County, Maryland, we have a County Executive, Doug Duncan, whose enthusiasm for undercover operations seems boundless. Teen smoking? Undercover operations to catch insufficiently zealous store owners. Minority Hiring? Undercover operations to "catch" local businesses not hiring...undercover officers. When there was a brouhaha recently about dog barking I fully expected Doug Duncan to dress cops up in cat suits and troll for trouble. Waco started as a tax case. Show me a law and I'll show you a district attorney who wants to be governor.

"I never saw any of them again," Philip Marlowe says at the end of The Long Goodbye. "Except the police. No way has yet been found to say goodbye to them."

But ways must be found to say, "Some other time." Because that's my sister you're talking about.

The Scandal Shifts - Unqualified Offerings has previously stated, based on news reports, that sworn Jew-Crusader foe John "Dick" Walker grew up within blocks of Unqualified Headquarters in Silver Spring, MD. But today, Best [Neocon-Approved Items] of the Web cites a Washington Post story that locates the Walker-Lindh family's Maryland years in nuclear-free (by law) Takoma Park. Which means the question becomes, What did Thomas Nephew know, and when did he know it?

(Historical Note: On 10/23/01, I wrote to Ginger Stampley, "The blog is up and running. Get yours started and I'll post a link to it. Perhaps one day we can have our own self-referential circle of a handful of sites" like, um, other bloggers out there. Mission accomplished!)

Problems in Early Childhood Education as seen in this abortive attempt at explaining corporate welfare to a five-year old:

Offering Boy: I want the Ravens to win.

Unqualified Offerings: The Ravens are bad, son.

Offering Boy: Why are they bad?

Unqualified Offerings: The Ravens stole Mommy and Daddy's money.

Mrs. Offering (from upstairs): No they didn't!

Unqualified Offerings: Hey!

This Is Sports Center With the Manichees - The NFL's wild card weekend ends with Evil winning three of four games (Eagles-Bucs, Jets-Raiders, Ravens-Dolphins). The fourth (Packers-Niners) was won by Tragically Misguided.

In other sports news, Tom Disch also won this weekend: ABC's promotional intros to the two Saturday games were based on a Lord of the Rings theme, and rather cleverly. Time was, football was about beating up Tolkein fans, not coopting their enthusiasms.

After Blogger - Good jeremiad by Photodude about the need for the blogitocracy to not only be prepared to move off Blogger and especially Blogspot but to actually start doing so. This point especially struck me:

A real curmudgeon might even add that some of you very high traffic individuals contribute greatly to the excess demand placed on the BlogSpot/Blogger servers. Whether you paid your $12 to get rid of an ad or not.

Unqualified Offerings is currently trying to decide between Movable Type and Greymatter for content management. (It has never used Blogspot.) It already, during the Blogger hack, resorted to Textpad and WS_FTP for an evening - not fun. Photodude warns that setup can be complicated. It gives Unqualified Offerings pause that those Houston bloggers did a first, test installation of Movable Type two weeks ago and still haven't cut over their production blogs, and they own even more technical savvy than they do roleplaying games.

A Question of Principles - Toward the end of last year, Unqualified Offerings falsified - somewhat snarkily - the Libertarian Party's claim to be the only US political party founded on a principle. It did this by identifying the principles underlying the Democratic and Green Parties. ("You need us to protect you from your own worst instincts" and "Die, Human Scum!" respectively. But it did not identify a core principle behind the GOP - because it isn't sure there is one. This, then, is a challenge Unqualified Offerings throws out to its Republican readers. (It knows you're out there, Eve Tushnet. Can the Republican Party be said to uphold an articulable principle, and what is it? Unqualified Offerings tends to think Joseph Stromberg has it right when he argues that

When Newt strode history's stage a few years back, he spent much time praising FDR...Conservatism suddenly stood revealed as the conservation of whatever the social democrats had put in place twenty or thirty years earlier, combined with even greater military spending than the social democrats might want.

but it wonders if "Not so fast" is a principle or just an impulse.

You Can Get Anything That You Want - Wide-column guy Emmanuel Goldstein of Airstrip One notes with...amusement is probably the closest word, that his site comes up as result 3 if you search Lycos for the single word "antiamerican." But it was result 4 that Unqualified Offerings got the biggest chuckle out of:

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