A Considered Response - This site has once before considered the wisdom of Washington Post echt-liberal columnist Mary McGrory, and it wasn't pretty. In her most recent column, McGrory notes that

The attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon inspired a wave of gun-buying such as the country has never seen. It isn't that people think they can repel terrorist attacks by handguns, they just feel safer being armed in their homes. Gun sales have quadrupled since Sept. 11.

and also that "There is currently no gun control legislation before either house of Congress."

Taking into account McGrory's concerns as a whole, Unqualified Offerings has formulated the following response:

Neener neener neener!

Distinctions - Antiwar.com's most energetic writer is, of course, Justin Raimondo. Its columnist most congenial to my own views is Alan Bock. But its best writer, without a doubt, is the scholar Joseph Stromberg. This fortnight he reviews The Lessons of Terror, by novelist and historian Caleb Carr. Maybe the most important paragraph in the review is the following:

And here we find what I see as one of the most important points in Carr's book. Carr is able to distinguish in principle between guerrillas and terrorists. It all has to do with his central theme. The question is who they target. Attacks by guerrillas on enemy armed forces are one thing; attacks by them on civilians, another.

This is the difference between attacking the USS Cole and attacking the World Trade Center. The point is not that the US should feel okay about someone blowing up its naval vessels. From the standpoint of national interest, it's an act of war and merits a warlike response. What it isn't is a crime against humanity, to resort to a much-used term, the way the attacks on the WTC were.

I suppose making the distinction will activate a lot of allergies to "moral equivalence." But it's allergy season anyway.

A New Motto - The strangest bits of language strike one. Unqualified Offerings has been reading Victor Davis Hanson's The Other Greeks lately. It thinks it might adopt the following sentence, taken from the endnotes, as its credo for this site:

I cannot be concerned here with an account of early urban culture.

So say we all!

Last Thoughts on Mid-Atlantic Blogfest - It's a truism that when writers get together all they talk about is money, and they lie. As sort-of writers, we were at a loss at first, since there's no money involved in what we do.

So we decided to lie about hits.

O Frabjous Day - Thomas Nephew has added pictures of Mrs. Offering and the other attendees of Mid-Atlantic Blogfest to Newsrack's account of the event.

Check It Out - I have been tardy in recommending Jeremiads, the weblog of writer Jeremy Lott, who also gets paid for writing. That gives him the visibility to mix it up with the Big Boys on things like bombing Mecca

Wilderness of Duponts - An anonymous tipster asserts that "Stephanie Dupont" is neither Brian Linse nor my dark horse candidate, Perry de Havilland. The tipster claims to know who "Stephanie" really is, but doesn't name name (sic). Which puts us right back to the Kinky Friedman Theory that, I think, The Illuminated Donkey first broached.

Oh. Good point: No one cares any more.

Yes, But - Avedon Carol offers some equivocal agreement with the Maggie Thatcher piece below, complete agreement with UO's - let's face it - unassailable espose of the Iced Tea Gap, and nevertheless a block of anti-Thatcher invective worthy of Elvis Costello. It's worth noting that Avedon Carol's Sideshow is an official Well-Written Liberal Weblog.

Blogging in Spurts - Unqualified Offerings has posted a lot in the last couple of days. It thinks. Tonight it is tired. It has to take care of some gaming things, and then an early bedtime.

For Better And For Worse - The formal rules on military tribunals have been released and they're better than previously threatened. On the other hand, Fritz Hollings has repackaged the SSSCA and it's gotten even worse. Now renamed "The Andean Initiative" it - no, that's not right. Now renamed the "We Murder Time and Truth, Love, Laughter and Belief Act" - no, that's not it either. For the real story on renaming the SSSCA go here. (Link via Instapundit.)

Unless That Government Is Run By Ariel Sharon - The bedouin, who would like to be nomads, have not prosecuted terror campaigns against Israel or called for the destruction of the Jews. And a fat lot of good that has done them, according to this Post article. What we have here is a socialist government stomping all over property rights and traditional folkways. You could argue that from a libertarian perspective that's...kind of wrong. At the very least, the Israeli government might recall those words of Abraham Lincoln: "One war at a time."

Rumors of War - Two Post pieces on Afghanistan worth reading. In one, the chiefs of CIA and DIA warn that warm weather brings the risk of "smaller units who intend to really operate against you in a classic insurgency format." In the other, the last US troops out of Gardez tell reporter Michael Ricks "that al Qaeda fighters here were not a ragtag band of zealots but a surprisingly effective military force."

I have a couple of thoughts occasioned by the reporting on Operation Anaconda. First, the basic Unqualified Offerings principle of overcounting surely applies: The body count is always smaller than you think. While US forces are claiming 500-800 dead, I'm betting the real number is a quarter of that at best. To the whole history of overestimates, add the famous Marc Herold miscount of Afghan civilian dead.

Second, these were foreign fighters around Gardez, meaning the non-Afghan colonialist cadres that make up al Qaeda, and several sources report that they have been regrouping in Pakistan and re-infiltrating into Afghanistan. What hasn't been noted that I've seen is that this means substantial, disciplined al Qaeda forces wanted to get back into Afghanistan at all. Months after the US and Northern Alliance drove the Taliban from power. Why? If you're an international terrorist, why not go somewhere else? They say Indonesia is nice. The answer that suggests itself is that al Qaeda still thinks the US can be beaten, or at least tied down and beaten on. Doesn't mean they're right, but it doesn't mean they're stupid either.

Hints of what we may be in for from the Pincus article:

Intelligence sources said that during Operation Anaconda, a Pakistani commander had left one section of the border open, apparently allowing some al Qaeda and Taliban forces to escape. U.S. commanders reported that hundreds of enemy fighters were killed in the assault, though some Afghan officials said the U.S. estimates are too high.

Pakistan is that country whose textiles George Bush decided not to stop penalizing after all. UO has to ask, again, is this any way to run an empire?

Is This Any Way to Run an Empire? - The US is reducing the reward for Osama bin Laden from $25 million to - a flock of sheep. No, really.

Uncle Sam is now "downsizing" the reward. The US will now offer to build a road, dig a well, or give away a flock of sheep to Afghan communities that rat on Bin Laden. The change in the "booty treatment" comes after American officials in the region found that poor Afghan peasants were clueless about Big Money. A general reportedly asked an Afghan what he could do with $25 million if he helped the United States find Osama Bin Laden. The local replied that the money might be enough to feed his nine children for a year.

So the Bush administration has now considered a $5 million discretionary fund to pay for basic inducements such as cash, livestock or help drilling a well. The hope is that average Afghans, many of whom are poor and illiterate, can relate to owning a flock of sheep more than becoming a millionaire.

1) This is all well and good, but it just means that our crack propagandists weren't successfully communicating the size of the reward to our target audience.

2) The real target audience is people who most emphatically do know what $25 million will buy you: present and former ISI officers; present and former Afghan and Pakistani officials of all kinds; fuzzy, big-eyed warlords. Let the nice folks at Libertarian Samizdata, who provided the link, pull out their armament mags and show such people just what they can get with their money. As if they didn't know.

3) It wasn't long ago that the papers were reporting that bin Laden and Mullah Omar escaped from Tora Bora by outbidding us for our own local proxies. $25 million was always too small, not too large. Sadly, this is a case where this site can say, "Advantage: Unqualified Offerings!"

Cry Me a River of Crocodile Tears - Lead sentence from Wednesday's David Broder column in the Washington Post:

Unless someone steps in to stop it, the descent to bitter partisanship in Washington will increasingly jeopardize the functioning of government.

Demolition Man - Charles Dodgson makes short work of a harebrained middle east peace idea of deep thinker Thomas Friedman. Maybe "idea" overstates. As Paul Simon's character said to Woody Allen's character in Annie Hall, "At the moment it's just a Notion, but with a bit of backing I think I could turn it into a Concept, and then..."

Let's Give Them Something to Talk About - A pretty fair synopsis of the nearly-famous Mid-Atlantic Blogfest drug policy smackdown on Newsrack. Unqualified Offerings will post a much less fair account of its own arguments when it is not its gaming night.

Toward a Libertarian Rushmore - A depressing thought of the "There's two kinds of libertarians in the world" variety:

1) Libertarians are radically skeptical of government, unless that government is run by Jefferson Davis.

2) Libertarians are radically skeptical of government, unless that government is run by Ariel Sharon.

Tell me there's an option 3...

Split Differences - Diana Moon of "Letter From Gotham" says "Finally, Jim Henley of Unqualified Offerings splits it down the middle, saying that no such blogborg exists but then saying that what he calls the Official Constellation should be characterized as pro-Wolfowitz, and not pro-Bush. How Jim can that I have mischaracterized something that doesn't exist--but which he has named--is a logical inconsistency that he will have to clear up before we can take this any further." She refers to some quibbles I had with her "Herd of Codependent Minds" piece.

The answer to the question, How can Jim say something doesn't exist and then recharacterize it? is, I don't think I did. (Note: Unqualified Offerings has been pursuing this topic for awhile now.) What I said or meant to say was that the (unmodified) "blogosphere" is vaster than the Reynolds-Sullivan circle, even if one restricts "blogosphere" to pundit-blogs only - indeed, even if one restricts it to warblogs. The Reynolds-Sullivan circle certainly exists, and I keep trying to come up with names for it. I don't recall whether it was me or Moira Breen who coined "Official Constellation" to describe the group in question, but it's a handy term. My own relationship to the OC is best defined as "an unperson," which is fair, since there are plenty of them that I avoid in turn.

So the OC exists, but it is only "pro-Bush" to the extent that the President himself pursues the agenda of "a certain wing of the Republican party to use the events of September 11 as a blank check for a permanent war," in Diana's words. But I interpreted "blogosphere" in Diana's original piece as impugning more than the OC - there are a lot of warblogs out there and a they don't all line up neatly behind Sullivan and Reynolds on matters of war and piece. Matt Welch is even in the Reynolds-Sullivan circle, and he has pointed out publicly that he is no Iraq hawk. I consider myself a warblogger, and combine complete support for a merciless campaign against al Qaeda and the Taliban - what I have called the Don't Tread on Me War - with opposition to prophylactic war against countries that did not attack us on our own soil. Andy Kashdan dissents from the ultrahawk program, and I certainly consider him part of any "blogosphere" worthy of the name. Ginger Stampley doesn't, I think, consider herself a warblogger, but she has combined the same support for action against al Qaeda with skepticism about lengthening the enemies list one sees here and in - Letter from Gotham. For that matter, Diana's concerns about immigration and "permanent war" would incline me to class her with the paleocons. But her sympathy for Israel seems much stronger than the paleocon norm, which is no sympathy for Israel.

It's a big-ol' "blogosphere," is what I was saying. I was also saying a separate thing, about whether "pro-Bush" was the most accurate way to characterize the part that Diana called the "pro-Bush blogosphere," aka the Official Constellation, the uberhawk blogs, the imperialist blogs etc.

More Great Stephen Hunter - From 'Gone' But Not Forgiven:

Thus did the repulsive James Cameron get to crow and strut like a popinjay on methamphetamine and take on the role of elder statesman as his haute-bourgie opus, with its oh-so-neat dichotomy between rich scum and noble workers, was feted. Thus did a movie, which a friend lovingly described as "a story about an adult woman who falls in love with a 13-year-old boy with a really big head," acquire more Oscars than any film since "Ben-Hur." Thus, briefly, did Leonard DiCaprio rule the world and get to date supermodels. I hope they've wised up -- the supermodels, about whom I worry obsessively.

You expect this from a man with the sense to point out that 2001: A Space Odyssey - kinda sucked.

Another Reason the Post is Better Than the Times - Could you imagine the NYT publishing Stephen Hunter's favorable review of a new exhibit at (gasp!) the NRA Museum?? Hunter is the Post's movie reviewer and a writer of thrillers. He's an example of real diversity - diversity of viewpoint - at my city's major paper. Long an unabashed voice for gun rights and sport hunting; skeptical of the state and the modern left who nevertheless recognizes the brilliance of The Battle of Algiers. After the Elian-snatching, the gun-savvy Hunter brought an expert's eye to the famous photo, giving the lie to the feds' claims about how demurely the, ahem, jack-booted thug was bearing his weapon.

"In this way, as the show has been superbly curated by Philip Schreier and his staff, it's possible to travel American history from the bottom up, absorbing lessons about the technology of the period while recalling its dramatization by the film industry." Superbly curated - at the NRA Museum. It says in the Post. Praise the Lord and Pass the - You Know.

The Falklands, Then and Now - In his Airstrip One column yesterday, Christopher Montgomery has a lot to say about the Reagan Administration's foursquare lack of support for Great Britain's effort to take its territory back from the junta then ruling Argentina. His essay is largely pitched to a British audience, but there are things to note from the American side as well. While this site already nominated, somewhat cheekily, Jimmy Carter as the world leader who won the Cold War, you can make a pretty good case that the Thatcher government's Falklands War was as important to the Cold War's outcome as anything else.

Oh right. Argentina was not an Eastern Bloc nation, just another neofascist shithole in the Southern Hemisphere. Granted. But you have to recall the times for what they were. If the early 80s were "Morning in America," 1982, the 70s still lingered like morning breath. Recent history was a history of Western reversals, many seemingly unopposed. Vietnam; Afghanistan (it seemed); "Zionism is Racism"; the UN General Assembly's expulsion of Taiwan; America Held Hostage. The phrase "paper tiger" was on the lips of everyone south of the Tropic of Cancer and east of the Iron Curtain. It seemed that any nation on earth could twist the lion's or the eagle's tail with impunity.

After Margaret Thatcher demonstrated that the West would not only fight back, but would win, you didn't hear that talk so much.

Other things happened in the eighties, yes. Some might point to Grenada. But really, which was the more impressive military and political feat? Which said it with an exclamation point?

But there is more to say than "Good on you, Maggie." Because what's significant is that Great Britain did the signal service of reviving the credibility of Western resolve in the face of sustained resistance by those tough guys and gals in the Reagan Administration. The United States considers itself a friend to both nations, Jean Kirkpatrick said. Al Haig did everything he could to get Britain to accede to Argentina's fait accompli. Montgomery has the details.

So if the toughest-talking, biggest hawks in the Ruling Party had gotten their way, they would have tangibly harmed America's real interests. Parallels with the present day suggest themselves. This is not to say "Peace Now!" It is to say "Which War?" We can't assume that the best answer comes from the toughest-sounding. I remember tough-sounding Ollie North, being asked by the Joint Committee about the cake and bible and the visit to Iran, piously informing his questioner that, "This country has enemies, Senator." This was before blogs, so I just screamed at the TV.

"Of course it does, you fool, and you've been playing footsie with them!"

There is not an exact parallel to North in the present conflict, unless it is those elements of the Bush administration still wedded to the odious Saudis, but there are certainly hawks whose counsel is not necessarily wise.

Oh There It Is - Paul Boutin provides a thorough demolition of the "missing Boeing" hoax on his cleverly-titled Paul Boutin blog. Since I am partly responsible for having propagated the hoax by linking to it the other day, it's incumbent upon me to send you to the refutation. Via Virginia Postrel's The Scene.

Another Country Heard From - Avowed Actual Canadian Mary LaCroix writes a delightful response to the recent Unqualified Offerings lament about the state of Canadian iced tea. Says Mary:

But it has also been my sad experience that most American establishments
just don't understand how to properly serve hot tea. (Parenthetically, I
must add that it seems necessary to explicitly order "hot tea" as on at
least one occasion, my request for "tea with lots of milk" resulted in a
puzzled glance from my waitress and her return to my table with a large
glass of fake iced tea and a large glass of milk).

Understand that I'm not demanding the finest Assam brewed in bone
china, although I will gladly take that if it is available. I can be
quite happy with a hearty mass market brand made with boiling water in a
tiny metal teapot that will leak. But even that meager standard is rarely
attained. It's not just the fact that most restaurants have served my tea
in the form of a cup of fairly hot water with a damp, desolate little
teabag nuzzling up to its side. What really hurts is the tendency of
offices and budget restaurants to offer that powdered non-dairy concrete
dust in lieu of something that ever saw the inside of a teat.

Yet this is not enough to make me despair that our countries will never be
friends. We can each spread the word to our compatriots that there *is* a
better way to present brewed leaf extract, chilled or steaming. Deal?

Hey! You can't fool Unqualified Offerings! This is an example of that "moral equivalence" stuff it has been warned about, isn't it? But yeah, deal.

In the spirit of international comity, UO offers this link to George Orwell's "A Nice Cup of Tea." And this useful About.com page not only reinforces and expands on the principles Mary espouses above, it also offers a handy popup ad that will take you straight to the Net's largest casino.

Joys of Capitalism - From time to time Unqualified Offerings praises the best of the market economy in the vain hope that someone will give it large sums of money for doing so. It especially loves products which do just what they say they will do. That does not usually include Drano, but Mrs. Offering declares enthusiastically that it does include Drano Max. And a darned good thing. Unqualified Offerings left a house where you had to time shaving and toothbrushing to avoid the bathroom sink overflowing. It returned to - well, the After segment of a commercial. Go SC Johnson, which, in a weird instance of synchronicity, has a Canadian website. Actually, since SC Johnson also makes Edge shaving gel, there's a sense in which they are just undoing the mess they made of my pipes in the first place.

And the Creek Don't Rise - Maryland has been having a severe drought for, depending on how you count these things, months or years, but that seems to be true of much of eastern North America. (People spoke of it in Moncton too, when we discussed fishing.) The Maryland Department of Natural Resources is having to delay trout stocking on many local streams, while hoping late rains bring water levels up. Certainly, the two creeks Unqualified Offerings has had a chance to see so far this spring don't look appreciably deeper than they did last September. Happily, it's been a wet weekend, with cold rain yesterday and today and more predicted for the coming week. It rained all over UO this morning as it caught two young smallmouths on a short morning outing.

Speaking of Forces for Good and Hard Times Cafe, Unqualified Offerings knows what the second-best thing about coming home was (after seeing the family again) - it is back in the land of real, brewed iced tea. "Here is a way to get rich," it suggested to its business partners one day, brandishing a steaming cup of fresh Red Rose tea with sugar in it, "take this clear brown beverage, chill it and serve it with ice. It makes a delicious, refreshing drink that people will love." Unqualified Offerings quickly learned not to order "iced tea" in New Brunswick restaurants, lest it be served the Nestea fountain drink concoction that also comes in cans. There was no brewed iced tea anywhere, even unsweetened.

Our two countries never can be friends.

He Resembles That Remark - Michael "Ones and Zeroes" Croft writes to remind that there has been a photo of Mrs. Offering on the web for some time. He should know, since he not only hosts the website where it appears, but took the picture. Here you can see Ginger Stampley, Mrs. Offering, some fat guy and Offering Boy. The picture was taken outside the original, and legendary, Hard Times Cafe in Old Town Alexandria.

Unqualified Offerings says, "Doh!" Meanwhile, Thomas Nephew writes that he will be cutting back on Newsrack posting to take care of pesky non-blog responsibilities like work and home. This is sad, because Newsrack is a great force for good. It's not clear whether the hiatus will preempt his posting Mid-Atlantic Blogfest pictures, but it might.

Mid-Atlantic Blogfest, After-Action Report - It looks like Dave Tepper got the first report in, because he didn't wimp out or sleep like the rest of us, posting as soon as he got home from the marathon event. Hey, if you're 41, a six-hour evening counts as a marathon event!

Mid-Atlantic Blogfest makes the so-far unconfirmed claim to have occurred at more places than previous events in LA, London and New York. We started at Taliano's in Takoma Park, when Taliano's commenced playing jazz at 8, the festers, a group of people who love to talk, decamped for Savory's down the street, where we could hear ourselves. At Savory's the beverage of choice was cocoa, which comes there in very large, very flavorful "cups" - we won't call them urns because they each have only one handle. After closing Savory's down, the festers headed for Silver Spring institution the Tastee Diner, where the group did its best to get cholesterol-centric parts of the economy back on their feet. (Actually, socially-active Will Wilkinson had decamped for the downtown club scene by that point.)

Present were Dave, Will, Unqualified Offerings; Mrs. Offering; Corsair the Rational Pirate, with new, lasik-improved eyes; Eve Tushnet, who's last name is not pronounced like something you'd catch someone's bottom with, but rather like "HUSH, pet;" Tony Adragna, freed by the party locale from the necessity of Shouting 'Cross the Potomac; Justin Slotman of what everyone agreed was the very coolly-named Insolvent Republic of Blogistan; and the dean of DC-area newsbloggers, Thomas "Newsrack" Nephew.

You might think that a gathering of so many opinionated people of such diverse views couldn't help but end in shouting about everything from drugs to foreign policy, but you would be wrong. The shouting came in the middle. Before that came wings, pizza and good fellowship; and after, coffee, breakfast foods and good fellowship. Other highlights:

• The generous Mr. Nephew refusing payment for the cocoa he ordered for everyone.
  
• Justin explaining how curling is supposed to work, if not why.
  
• Tony Adragna's account of the ferment on Slate's Fray that gave birth to so many weblogs.
  
• Corsair's rejection of a perfectly serviceable theme song Unqualified Offerings composed for his site
  
• Corsair's business card
  
• Eve Tushnet on the virtues of Samuel R. Delany

The low point was surely Unqualified Offerings' pathetic attempt to "lead" two other blog-cars from Old Town Takoma Park to the Tastee Diner in downtown Silver Spring, a route that involved one complete circle at an intersection and every secondary road in lower Montgomery County.

Thomas took pictures that he will presumably post soon, which will give a grateful web its first images of Mrs. Offering, whom Dave Tepper correctly characterizes as "smart and beautiful." Justin Slotman admitted to wondering if it was "too geeky to come all the way" from southern New Jersey for the event, but was assured that it was just geeky enough.