Second Thoughts - Rather than publish it, Unqualified Offerings should just lie down until this paranoid feeling goes away, but the more it thinks about it, the more the Johnelle Bryant interview sounds like a crock of shit. Darned if I can figure who would propound it or why, though.

Don't Go There - Over on the Illuminated Donkey, Ken Goldstein has posted a Larry King-column parody item. This is Not a Good Idea, Ken. Not Not Not. The similarity between a typical weblog and Larry King's USA Today columns is way too strong to go drawing attention to it.

Ken's comments functionality is also allowing his site to become a vector of the dire "King of America" meme, the deeply mistaken judgment that that album is Elvis Costello's best or on the short list of his best. It's easily in the bottom third of Costello's oeuvre. The lyrics are so-so, the melodies slack and mid-tempo. As for the singing, there's "caressing the vocal," and then there's "copping a feel." The difference between KOA and top-notch Costello is easy to measure: simply compare "American Without Tears," from the album, with "American Without Tears, Part II (Twilight Version)" from the outtake vehicle of your choice. The music is more taut, the singing less affected, and the lyrics astoundingly fresher and more acute. Compare:

Outside in New Orleans
the heat was almost frightening
while inside my hotel room
was freezing and unkind
On TV they prosecute
anyone who's exciting
so I put on my overcoat
and went down to find...

from the supposed "real song" ("American Without Tears"), with

December 1965 in Caracas
when Arnie LaFlamme took
his piece of the pie
Well he packed up the casino chips
the IOU and the abacus
and switched off the jukebox
in "A Fool Such as I"

from the supposed afterthought. A comparison of the complete lyrics to AWT and AWT#2 is instructive. For an aural comparison, you can currently find AWT#2 on the bonus disk that comes with the Rhino reissue of Blood and Chocolate, which by the way is a much better record than King of America and Unqualified Offerings is glad we straightened that out.

Speaking of Linking - Scotland can fairly claim to be where laissez-faire capitalism began. Now it returns in "Freedom and Whisky," run by Scotsman David Farrer. The title of the blog comes from Burns. Well it should!

F&W is emphatically not a warblog, so it makes a nice change of pace. It concentrates on British economic and political issues, with an emphasis on Scotland. Items tend to be short and direct. Check it out.

That's the Way You Do It - The unwritten commandment of the blogosphere is that thou shalt not abuse thy fellow second or third-tier blogger. (Unqualified Offerings is a third-tier blog, if anyone is keeping score.) But the fallback rule is crucial: say anything you want about someone, but at least link them while doing so. I've seen this rule violated by some bigtimers. But Diana Moon gets it right on Letter From Gotham. When in the course of an "I'm rubber and you're glue" moment she calls Jim of Objectionable Content "a fanatic and an ideologue" (enough such on both sides and peace would be at hand), she honors the Code of the Blogosphere. This genuinely matters.

Phew! Those Brits are just full of ideas! The ones in the government anyway - apparently Foreign Secretary Geoffrey Hoon suggested to the Indians that a joint UK-US military force could patrol Kashmir. Here's the good news: India quickly said forget it. No sooner said than done, India!

Let a Hundred Flowers Blog - Eve Tushnet said something important the other night at the DC blogger bash. Rhetoric is more important than political action because I'm convinced politicians do what they're forced to do by circumstance, she said, and the rhetorical context is a major component of the prevailing circumstance.

Blogs may be an inefficient mechanism for social and political change, but they're probably not as inefficient as voting, and maybe not even as inefficient as running for office.

Lifeboat Games - So what are we doing to defend the country from that handful of highly-infectious biological agents? Good question. The CDC Health Issues links to "Bioterrorism" and "Biological Agents" get you "Page Not Found" errors, presumably as a "security measure." However, if you poke around, you can find the executive summary of the "Interim Smallpox Response Plan & Guidelines." The CDC notes that there is insufficient quantity of vaccinia virus for an "indiscriminate" vaccination campaign. (Question: How much vaccine could the feds buy with the proceeds of the farm bill?) The CDC recommends a "ring vaccination" approach that focuses on citizens closest to an infected citizen, and on - healthcare workers and government employees.

1. Public health personnel in the area involved in surveillance and epidemiological data analysis and reporting whose support of these public health activities must remain unhindered

2. Logistics/resource/emergency management personnel whose continued support of response activities must remain unhindered

3. Law enforcement, fire, and other personnel involved in other non-direct patient care response support activities such as crowd control, security, law enforcement, and firefighting/rescue operations.

2. and 3. are where your mayors, city council types, congresscritters and their staffers slip into the vaccination line ahead of, well, the rest of us.

Evaluation of the potential risk for aerosol transmission and initiation of vaccination for non- direct contacts will be done by CDC, state, and local public health personnel. The decision to offer vaccination to non-direct contacts of smallpox cases will be made jointly by Federal and the State health officials.

"Non-direct contacts" = "regular folks who haven't, to that moment, come into the presence of a known smallpox sufferer."

Weapons of Some Destruction - If we're going to think straight about WMDs, we need to clarify what will and what won't serve to visit mass destruction. Once we start asking that question, chemical weapons appear to drop right off the list, and so do most germs.

Chemical weapons are creepy; don't get Unqualified Offerings wrong on that score. But in terms of lethality, eh. For instance, one of the big items in the brief against Saddam Hussein is his destruction of the Kurdish town of Halabja with chemical weapons. Reading accounts of the massacre, it appears that, while it was horrific, and certainly a war crime, it remains that

o Geographically, Halabja was almost ideally suited to attack by chemicals, with mountains to the north, east and south.

o The Iraqi air force bombarded Halabja repeatedly throughout the morning of March 17, 1988.

o One account says the Iraqi Air Force also used cluster bombs - the wording suggests that these were not chemical agents but regular explosives.

o Another claims that Iraq used artillery on the western routes out of town to prevent escape.

o The same site puts Halabja's population at 45,000.

o Casualties: 5,000 dead, 7,000 injured per that account.

Some of the injuries are horrific. Let no one mistake UO's meaning here: Halabja was not nothing. But in uniquely suitable conditions - a fishbowl, no meaningful defenses, sustained bombardment - the kill rate was 10% and the casualty rate about 25%.

It's just not possible for a terror attack to replicate those favorable conditions. Even if your real concern is Israel's, rather than America's, security, there is no chance that an Iraqi or Iranian missile attack could duplicate the key elements of concentration of the agents, duration of the assault, and foreclosure of escape routes that Iraq achieved at Halabja.

You can do at least as well flying jets into skyscrapers if you're feeling surly. Indeed, you can do a lot better - if you're a terrorist and not a large counter-insurgency force operating on your own territory.

The terror assault using chemical weapons that we know of is Aum Supreme Truth's sarin attack on the Tokyo subway. Committed ideologues, confined space, crowded conditions: 12 dead.

The body count does not compare favorably to a single truck bomb.

Unqualified Offerings suspects that determined terrorists could find a way to produce hundreds of deaths in a chemical weapons attack. But that leaves chemical terrorism well within the range of lethality from existing, non-chemical terrorist options.

Biological weapons are not so easy to dismiss. But one of the agents it looks like we can knock off the list of weapons of mass destruction is anthrax.

There are two recent anthrax incidents to consider. We know about the letter attacks in the US - a dozen or so dead, several more sick, and most of the dead older or otherwise infirm to begin with. No, it wasn't a very efficient delivery mechanism. The question is what would be better? I've seen people suggest that terrorists could pump anthrax (or chemicals) into the ventilation system of a single building, infecting almost everyone within. Well, probably, yes. As we know all too well, there are other ways to kill people in buildings, however. Again, it's destruction, and it's terror, but it's not mass destruction. The "cropduster option" may well kill people, but it's not clear you get enough concentration of the agent to infect whole cities' worth of people at once.

The other data point is the outbreak at Sverdlovsk. That was, to the best of our knowledge, an accident. A biological weapons plant vented anthrax into the atmosphere for, by one estimate, an hour and a half or so. Deaths: 64+. Dr. Kanatjan Alibekov, who headed the USSR's biological weapons program for a time after the Sverdlovsk release, speculates that had the prevailing winds been pointed toward Sverdlovsk rather than away, death rates would have been in the five-figure and maybe the six-figure range.

The claim is unavoidably speculative, and over and over we see advance casualty estimates overstate actual casualties by as much as an order of magnitude. Two things to keep in mind about "speculative Sverdlovsk": the delivery mechanism, an entire factory full of anthrax upwind of a nearby city, would be hard for terrorists or an enemy government to replicate; also, you have to take into account 1970s-era Soviet healthcare versus 21st-century US healthcare. What's more, the Soviets had to keep the nature of the trouble secret in 1979. One likes to think, at least, that we would not be operating under that burden.

You can kill people with anthrax. It doesn't look like you can kill more people with anthrax than you can with exploding vehicles.

Smallpox has some promise as a genuine WMD, if you can deliver it. It's very infectious, which anthrax isn't. I think the estimates of as many as 100 million deaths in the event of an attack using smallpox in the US are the usual wild overestimates by parties with an interest in hyping the numbers. I suspect the country would quickly institute effective countermeasures to limit the spread of infection. I also think that those countermeasures would involve some nigh-ruinous economic costs. Worst-case scenario: a couple of million dead and many billions of dollars in damages.

That's pretty massive destruction.

Then there are nukes. The least you can say about the sort of nuclear weapons one can really imagine terrorists getting ahold of - the so-called "container bombs" that would come into a port city with regular freight, and then blow up - is that it would be more lethal than available vehicular explosives (truck bombs, planes full of jet fuel, like that). The Hiroshima bomb killed 200,000. It was air-detonated, which a terror-nuke probably wouldn't be. Estimated death rate for a terror-nuke: five figures, six if everything breaks their way.

That's also pretty massive destruction.

Note: Some of the preceding is just teasing out some political implications of the famous "Red Thomas e-mail," The "Real" Deal about Nuclear, Bio, and Chemical Attacks. I am saying that "weapons of mass destruction" is on the way to being a voodoo phrase, and that the enthusiasts of allegedly prophylactic war use it for the same reason left-wing pressure groups invoke "the children" - as a political soporific. The phrase is being used to anesthetize the critical faculties of the body politic, when our critical faculties are what the problem most calls for.

Aside from counterterrorism and national defense in general, our real "weapons of mass destruction" problem is nukes and a handful of highly-infectious biological agents.

One-Liner of the Week - Considering the late-arriving shinbone of Chandra Levy, Gene Healy writes:

Why do I get the feeling that the D.C. police force would have trouble finding porn on the internet?

Wobbly Watch - Ginger "Content is Queen" Stampley has added an item of visual interest to What She Really Thinks. Shame!

Playing Catchup - Unqualified Offerings was going to draw everyone's attention to Charles Dodgson's acute comments on the Bush security reorganization plan. But everybody else and his brother have already done that. Advantage: Electrolite!

Speaking of Electrolite, PNH has yet another indispensible, pithy item there this morning, one that suggests that he is in New York, but not of New York:

Both Jarvis and Yglesias give Rowley points, albeit grudgingly, but it's hard to avoid being struck by the attitude that sees "midwestern" and "midlevel" as infra dig. From here it looks like the problem is that the people in charge of our security think pretty much exactly like Jeff Jarvis and Matthew Yglesias--which is to say, like a well-connected East Coast media maven and a smart Harvard undergrad. For people like them, or like Robert Mueller and George Tenet, someone like Coleen Rowley is and always will be the sort of person you ignore. After all, she's a drone. Single-minded in a weirdly, you know, unironic way. All in all, midlevel: the very definition of "a cog." Okay, sure, maybe she could accidentally know something important, but how could she possibly have any real big-picture insight?

Jarvis and Yglesias are good guys, but (wittingly or unwittingly, I can't quite tell) they're offering a window into exactly why we're where we are.

Rowley has done pretty well for an inconvenient woman in a scandal though. It's been, what, a week now? and nobody has yet attempted to dismiss her on the basis of her looks.

I've a Feeling We're Not in Montgomery County Anymore - What's one hint that Garrett County, in far western Maryland, does not think the way the Baltimore-DC suburb-Annapolis triangle of the Free State does?

"Ollie North Road" in Oakland, MD.

One Man's Terrorist... - During intra-establishment schmoozing yesterday - excuse Unqualified Offerings! During FBI Director Robert Mueller's lunch with Washington Post editors yesterday, Mueller spoke at length about the Moussaoui case and the evidence available before... you know. Let's look at one specific item from the story:

In her letter to Mueller, Rowley wrote that the French reports "confirmed his affiliations with radical fundamentalist Islamic groups and activities connected to Osama bin Laden." She argued that agents had enough evidence in hand "within days" of Moussaoui's arrest to provide probable cause for a warrant.

Headquarters officials, however, insist that the French information detailed no direct ties between Moussaoui and any designated terrorist group, a requirement for obtaining a FISA warrant. The Chechen rebels, while believed to have links with bin Laden, were not considered a terrorist group by the State Department.

As it happens, the Chechen rebels have long been considered terrorist groups by the Russians. Not that we would listen to them. In fact, in the aftermath of the September massacres, there has been much chin-pulling by sober commentators about how the United States must not "let" the Russians use the excuse of a "war on terrorism" as an excuse to violate Chechen rights. Al Qaeda support for Chechen rebel groups has been pretty well established, but then, al Qaeda support for the Kosovo Liberation Army was pretty clear too, and we fought an entire war on behalf of the KLA only three years ago.

We are pretty persnickety about whom we allow other countries to designate as terrorists. In this case, fastidiousness about applying the label to Chechen rebel groups seems to have been a factor preventing the issuance of the FISA warrant to search Moussaoui's effects.

It matters because of some of the talk I heard last night at DC Blogfest. We would only conquer bad countries that attempt to acquire "weapons of mass destruction," bad per some recognized index of aggressiveness and authoritarianism, including support for "terrorists." I argued last night, and the news this morning only reinforces the view, that the notion that we could derive and apply a standard of "preemption" that would be fair, just and prudent, and recognized as such by others, is a fantasy. A dangerous fantasy, both morally and practically.

In the Moussaoui case, the very definition of "terrorist groups" was hostage to the diplomatic imperatives of the US foreign policy bureaucracy. Any program of prophylactic war will be hostage to the agendas and biases of the institutions charged with carrying out the policy and the advocacy organs with the greatest enthusiasm for using military force.

The Awful Truth - Andrew Sullivan links to an ABCNews interview with Johnelle Bryant, manager of a Florida office of the US Department of Agriculture, in which she recounts Mohammed Atta's attempts to get a loan from her office for "a cropduster" in the spring of 2000. ABC News reports that, according to captured al Qaeda bastard Abu Zubaydah, the original plan was to pack a small plane with explosives and use it as a bomb.

Sullivan has one thing to say about the interview. Unqualified Offerings has a couple. Sullivan:

Sorry, but I found this ABC News interview mind-blowing. Mohammed Atta might as well have worn a sandwich board saying "I AM A TERRORIST WITH WILD STARING EYES AND WANT TO RENT AN AIRPLANE!!!" I guess hindsight is easy - but sometimes it's also obvious.

Unqualified Offerings can see where Sullivan is coming from, based on the text of the story. For instance:

"At first, he refused to speak with me," said Bryant, remembering that Atta called her "but a female." Bryant explained that she was the manager, but he still refused to conduct business with her. Ultimately, she said, "I told him that if he was interested in getting a farm-service agency loan in my servicing area, then he would need to deal with me."

Throughout the interview, he continued to refer to Bryant as "but a female," and Bryant said, "He would say it with disgust."

And

When Bryant explained that there was an application process, Atta became "very agitated." He thought the loan would be in cash, and that he would have no trouble obtaining it to purchase an aircraft.

He also remarked about the lack of security in the building, pointing specifically to a safe behind Bryant's desk. "He asked me what would prevent him from going behind my desk and cutting my throat and making off with the millions of dollars in that safe," said Bryant, who explained that there was no money in the safe because loans are never given in cash, and also that she was trained in karate.

And (BIG text block coming!)

Before leaving Bryant's office, Atta became fixated with an aerial photo of Washington that was hanging on her office wall.

"He just said that it was one of the prettiest, the best he'd ever seen of Washington," she said, remembering that he was impressed with the panoramic view that captured all the monuments and buildings in one photograph, pointing specifically to the Pentagon and the White House.

"He pulled out a wad of cash," she said, "and started throwing money on my desk. He wanted that picture really bad."

Bryant indicated that the picture was not for sale, and he threw more money down.

"His look on his face became very bitter at that point," Bryant remembers. "I believe he said, 'How would America like it if another country destroyed that city and some of the monuments in it,' like the cities in his country had been destroyed?"

Atta also expressed an interest in visiting New York, specifically the World Trade Center, and asked Bryant about security there. He inquired about other American cities, including Phoenix, Los Angeles, Seattle and Chicago. Prompted by a souvenir she had on her desk, he also expressed interest in the Dallas Cowboys' football stadium, mentioning that the team was "America's team" and the stadium had a "hole in the roof."

Atta also talked about life in his country. "He mentioned al Qaeda, he mentioned Osama bin Laden," said Bryant. "I didn't know who Osama bin Laden was … He could have been a character on Star Wars for all I knew."

He boasted about the role that they would one day play. "He said this man would someday be known as the world's greatest leader," she said.

Bryant and Atta shook hands on his way out. "I told him I wished him luck with his endeavor," remembered Bryant.

One could imagine Dr. Evil sitting before Ms. Bryant, chewing his pinky and asking for a loan to buy "death ray parts," and Ms. Bryant explaining that USDA couldn't finance death-ray construction until the applicant produced an exterminator's license, but you might want to try the bank downstairs and have a nice day. Unqualified Offerings can nevertheless sympathize with Bryant, because it used to manage retail stores, and you see some strange rangers when you work with the public. This next part does seem a little hard to miss, though:

But that wasn't the only time she saw Atta. He returned again, slightly disguised with glasses. He claimed to be an accountant for Marwan Al-Shehhi, who was with him, and said he wanted $500,000 to buy land for a sugar-cane farm.

Look,when embittered customers return to you in disguise, that's a sign.

I have to say, I am forced to wonder just how much of this interview is, well, true. Now you'll class me with the conspiracy theorists, but it's not like that necessarily. Memory is an active process, as Elizabeth Loftus has shown us. Could Bryant's memory have mutated substantially over the months since her encounter? I can't come up with anyone who would benefit by her putting this story around if it were false. So it's either a serious misrecollection, or it's largely true.

Let's assume it's largely true then. Along with other information we have, it suggests something at once dismaying and heartening: these people aren't that good. Remember "The Big Wedding" story of a couple of weeks ago. The Public Nuisance usefully pointed out that the al Qaeda code name practically screamed "Large Martyrdom Operation."

Unqualified Offerings should have noted at the time that the choice of code name was poor tradecraft on al Qaeda's part. A professional intelligence outfit will make sure its operational codenames are bureaucratic and uninformative. "MK/Ultra" - that's a code name.

We have every reason to believe that Mohammed Atta was one of al Qaeda's stars, and that the ringleaders of "The Big Wedding" were the class of the outfit. The September massacres were, as al Qaeda operations go, unprecedented in terms of daring, scale and, I would wager, complexity. You're not going to send Abu Shmoe to run that. And yet, if Bryant's account is to be believed, Atta couldn't even avoid yakking about his covert "employer" during the course of operational business. That's stunningly inept. The codename is insecure too, so the problem goes above Atta.

This implies that the level of support and training by professional intelligence agencies - good ones - must be even lower than we think. It suggests that al Qaeda's best and brightest are neither particularly bright nor all that terrific. The dismaying thing is that our manifold professional security organs couldn't stop these clowns from committing the biggest war crime the United States ever suffered. The heartening thing is that a group no better than this can be beaten. More importantly, a group no better than this that does get ahold of nasty germs or glowing bombs should tip its hand in any number of ways ahead of time.

After Party-Action Report - Last night was, more or less, DC Blogfest II, instigated this time by the CATO mafia of bloggers. It was much larger and noisier than Midatlantic Blogfest. Repeaters from the first event included Eve Tushnet, Dave Tepper, Will Wilkinson, Unqualified Offerings and Mrs. Offering. There were a lot of bloggers there from what is known locally as the "Atomic Billiards crowd," a group that tends more toward personal diaries than political ones. They apparently imagine that people care about their, um, fishing trips and, uh, party-going.

Dave Tepper pointed out that he's largely made the transition from political diarist to personal, because he figured he'd said what he has to say about politics already, and also that readers seem to like the more personal items. (His useful item on market fragmentation in the music biz, though, mixes personal reflection with economic analysis.)

Eve Tushnet brought her Yalie posse, Sara Russo and Shamed Dogan. I also got the chance to meet Brian Kelly of Libertyblog, who does pro bono work for the Republican Liberty Caucus and bore my rantings about the uselessness of the Republican Party with tremendous grace.

Thanks to Brink Lindsay, Radley Balko, Julian Sanchez and Gene Healy for organizing the event. (UO only wishes Leon Hadar had dropped by.) The venue, Rendezvous, gets only about a quarter of a golf clap: despite the fact that blogfest was pretty much their entire clientele that night, and it was a group of yakkers rather than dancers, they refused to turn the music down.

After-Action Report - Dialog with a gaming buddy:

GB: How are the fish?
UO: Disgustingly healthy.

Here follows a brief list of excuses for this site's lack of success on the North Branch of the Potomac, Maryland's avowed answer to the Snake River in Montana.

1) Flood. All the rain the I-95 corridor of Maryland and Virginia has not been getting, Western Maryland and West Virginia have. The river was high and muddy.

2) Statism. Hey, these are government trout! Naturally they will do everything in their power to frustrate me.

3. Timing. Tuesday afternoon I lost the prime fishing hours of 6-8pm because I ran out of line. The North Branch is a stone-bottomed river, and its flow is so fast, and has washed down so much sand and dirt from the bottom, that the stones form a labyrinth of nooks and crannies that is two or three layers deep. Consequently it's very easy to hang up a lure on the bottom and very hard to bounce it free. I lost literally every lure that was not a shallow-running plug - spinners, spoons, deep-running plugs, even jigs specifically-designed to bounce happily along rocky bottoms. Each lost lure meant a certain amount of lost line, too, until I reached the point where I had only a few rod-lengths of line left. And no spare line in the car (poor planning). So I had to cut Tuesday's fishing short to reprovision. Then I was late getting started Wednesday because of, um, sloth. Didn't hit the river until after 8am.

3) Ignorance. Experts recommend you hire a guide your first times on the North Branch. UO didn't do that.

The fishing itself was saved by Deep Creek Lake - the few towns along the North Branch are small and have no lodging. So I ended up at the Lakeside Motor Court Tuesday night, and took about a half hour at dusk to cast from the motel docks. And caught a lively 16" smallmouth on my ultralight rod, which was quite the adventure. This fish had a spouse or business partner or sycophant fish that followed it all the way to the dock, presumably asking, "Where the hell are you going?" the whole time. Presumably my fish had a chance to explain after I released him.

Deep Creek Lake is gorgeous, but I've almost always been there during prime July and August - prime summer vacation season, but the worst time of year to try to fish a popular lake. Once the lake warms up and school lets out, the pleasure boat traffic becomes brutal.

The North Branch itself is also, I can confidently state, one of the prettiest places on the face of the earth. And I will have my revenge. Oh yes.

I'll Never Lie to You - From time to time one weblogger or another has announced that they've "Gone Fishing." Have they really? Not at all. They're just speaking figuratively. What have they got to hide?

Unqualified Offerings really is going fishing (weather permitting), and will be back Thursday morning.

Don't Miss Item of the Day - Matt Welch is not a proponent of Endless War, but he has a (ferociously entertaining) brief against Dubya anyway:

To make an inappropriate basketball analogy, Bush's rhetorical flourishes are starting to feel like Vlade Divac flops -- very convincing at times, pointing toward some incontrovertible truths (Shaq bludgeons people with his left shoulder, and there are a lot of "evil folks" out there worth defeating). But at some point, the gap between the performance and the actual reality is so obviously large, Vlade/Bush "loses credibility with the refs," as stoner Bill Walton says. In other words, the exaggerated motions, instead of convincing you of the veracity of the deed in question, actually suggests the direct opposite. By the end of the Sacramento-L.A. series, Divac couldn't get any calls at all. By the end of this month, I predict, if Bush can't square his rhetoric with his offensive relationship with the House of Saud, if he continues to deliver pious lectures about free trade & Fast Track Authority while setting tariff-reduction back 10 years, if his administration continues engaging in tawdry ass-covering about Sept. 11 culpability, then many people who were predisposed to cutting the man some slack after Sept. 11 will start asking the metaphorical question: "Where's Shaq?"

Which reminds Unqualified Offerings that it was just plain wrong in predicting a Kings victory Sunday night, proving once again that, while I may know football, I don't know jack about hoops.

Another Thing I Hate About You - "What's the bug up Broder's ass in the first place?" asks Avram Grumer of Pigs & Fishes. He then answers.

It’s a bug I’ve taken to calling Insufficient Frowney Face.

Certain subjects in our culture are designated as necessarily somber; no civilized person is supposed to talk about them without a somber, respectful tone and a frown pasted firmly into place. The mandatory frowney face — absence of this when talking about the officially somber subject places one beyond the pale of civilization.

Certain modes of expression in our culture are designated as inherently anti-somber. Not just humor, but most forms of fantasy, no matter what narrative tone is adopted, are considered to necessarily lack any degree of frowney face. So a fantasy movie or TV show that includes designated somber subjects is therefore guilty of insufficient frowney face. So two of the most powerful items in our cultural toolkit — humor and fantasy — are officially off-limits if you’re trying to deal publicly with a national tragedy.

Meanwhile, Eve Tushnet gets even more vexed over Broder's "innocent America" than Unqualified Offerings did:

I HATE this cliche. I hate how America didn't lose its innocence with slavery--or the removal of the Cherokee--or the Civil War--or the World Wars--or Hiroshima and Nagasaki--but a pretty president pulls a Lincoln and suddenly America's lost her virginity? What kind of blinkered, privileged, everything-everyone-hates-about-the-Boomers perspective is this? C'mon.

This morning, it occurred to Unqualified Offerings that there was at least one passage of Broder's piece it had failed to jeer at and felt remorseful. It will now attempt to rectify that failing. Broder:

Actually, it is two movies in one -- part Andy Hardy and part "RoboCop 3."

The Andy Hardy part is a sweet, sentimental story about an awkward teenager and his feelings for the aunt and uncle who are raising him and for the girl next door. The other part is where someone should have asked: Do we really want to do this?

Unqualified Offerings: You can just imagine what Broder would have to say about the "Andy Hardy part" - awkward teenager gets the power to strike back at the popular kids who torment him and uses it - if Spiderman had come out eight months after Columbine.

More From Nobilis - One of the great things about the game is the many epigraphs author R. Sean Borgstrom has scattered throughout the rulebook in sidebars. These are "excerpts" from works that do not exist in our world but supposedly do exist in the world of the game. (Very Borges. And that's a good thing.) A particularly delightful example is the very first example on the fan site Borgstrom started.

Of all the epigraphs in the book, the one Unqualified Offerings most commends to the attention of its readers is this one:

Once, a man was so well-loved that he set the fields ablaze and the
peasants didn't mind.

Then he killed all the animals, and gave his folk dust to eat, and they didn't mind.

Then he dirtied the water with blood from his wars, and they didn't mind.

Then they tortured him slowly to death on the Stone Wheel, and when his heirs asked the peasants why, they said, "We thought he liked that sort of thing."

- from Parables for Our Modern Age, by Jackie Robinson

The applicability of this epigraph to current events is left as an exercise to the reader.

You can buy Nobilis online at Wizard's Attic.

Story of the Week so far is the censorship of literary passages on the New York State Regents Exams, as reported in Sunday's New York Times.

Ms. DeFabio said that as a result of an objection recently received from an author, the department had decided to use ellipses in future exams. She also said she thought it worthwhile that the department consider marking passages that were altered, but did not believe that it was necessary to ask authors' permission to change their work.

One passage was derived from Frank Conroy's memoir, "Stop-Time." The changes include replacing "hell" with "heck" in one sentence and excising references to sex, religion, nudity and potential violence (in the form of the declared intent of two boys to kill a snake) that are essential to an understanding of the passage.

The best blogging on this story so far comes from Patrick Nielsen Hayden. (Andrew Sullivan also weighs in, not that one can link to it.) As a former student of Regents' College (now, apparently, Excelsior College), New York State's acclaimed distance learners program, Unqualified Offerings is especially chagrined.

It should surprise no one that the article contains several quotes by NY Education Department officials, but not one expression of regret or contrition. The article says that many of the affected authors will hold a press conference today.

That Oughtta Work - Jim Hoagland, who parrots the conventional wisdom of the foreign policy elite as reliably as David Broder parrots the corresponding consensus on domestic policy, has an idea for preventing a major, possibly nuclear, war in South Asia.

Hot preemption has been a necessary corrective in Afghanistan and the West Bank. But anti-terror strikes must not become a springboard for settling old, existential scores in the Asian subcontinent. [Okay, why? - UO] American, British and other international pressure to shut off infiltration by Pakistani-controlled forces -- now -- and to get India to demobilize along that frontier is a small price to pay for avoiding that outcome. But time for diplomacy is melting away.

Unqualified Offerings is a dove, okay? But what is this "pressure" that Hoagland thinks will convince the Pakistani government - all of it, both its public and clandestine organs - to "shut off infiltration by Pakistani-controlled forces," which is to say, give up the dream of attaining all of Kashmir? Here's the thing: Pakistan really cares about Kashmir. They think about it even when we're not thinking about them. Even Pakistan's liberals approach Kashmir as a "blood and soil" issue. The conservatives add religion and see it as the object of Holy War. (They have a name for that kind of thing in Islam. It's very important to them. You could look it up.)

The likely dynamic at work is that Pakistan has stepped up support for Kashmiri violence because of the cooperation it has extended to the US and Britain recently, on its western flank. To the extent that Pervez Musharraf's cooperation against al-Qaeda has been sincere, he exposes his right flank to, well, the Islamofascists - in the ISI, the military and the madrassas. Approving or merely allowing increased covert action in Kashmir becomes Musharraf's way of demonstrating to the hardliners that he's not a sellout.

You can see what giving in to "American, British and other international pressure" would do to that strategy.

So: Kashmir matters to Pakistan as a whole. Kashmir is crucial to Musharraf's political survival and, military governments being military governments, likely his biological survival as well. What's left? Oh yes, Hoagland's imagined carrot: getting India to demobilize along the frontier.

Indian demobilization prevents an Indian invasion, yes. But it doesn't solve Kashmir. India is the status quo power in the Himalayas. It has what it wants already. Pakistan wants what it hasn't got. A demobilization that freezes the current territorial partition is India's win and Pakistan's defeat. If demobilization just gives Pakistan the opportunity to get back to infiltratin' and supportin' then India rushes back in pretty quick and we're back where we started.

Pakistan might accept a demobilization if one of those dreary conferences to "settle the status" of Kashmir came along with it. But India won't. That's not what status-quo powers do.

So all the "international pressure" in the world seems beside the point. Unless - David Broder take note - Hoagland means "pressure" like one of those rooms supervillains have, where the walls close slowly in on the occupants, threatening to crush them if they don't do the villain's bidding.

That might do it.

To Speak up and Remove all Doubt - If you still weren't convinced of the merits of Spiderman: the Movie, even after Unqualified Offerings detailed its virtues and, as a bonus, explained its relevance to The Issues of Our Day, demur no longer. Senescent dumbass David Broder (note: This is not going to be one of those "thoughtful" pieces for which this blog is known) not only dislikes it, he worries about it. His 16 column-inches of pursemouthed disapproval appears in today's Post under the scary hedder, "Web of Violence." Why does he do this? No, it's not to remind readers of Raymond Chandler's immortal quip about "old ladies of both sexes, and neither sex." That just sort of happens. Broder thinks it's all just too painful.

I was appalled -- first, that such a film had been released eight months after suicidal hijackers had flown airliners into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and, second, that so many of my neighbors -- people whose judgment and standards I would usually never question -- thought Columbia Pictures and Hollywood had served up great entertainment in this no-longer-comic comic-book tale.

I was there because the most reliable movie critic I know, my 13-year-old grandson, Daniel, had recommended "Spider-Man" to me. Half the people in the theater for this PG-13 rated film were his age or younger. That did not make me feel any better.

It so appalls Broder that his neighbors have a better sense of proportion than he does that he doesn't even notice how self-refuting his complaint gets. Kids tend to be less attuned to the news than adults and more resilient. The average 12-and-under-American will have been far less traumatized than 13-and-older Americans like David Broder and Unqualified Offerings. So to the extent Spiderman is supposed to evoke post-traumatic stress syndrom in our fragile American psyches, a higher proportion of children in the audience is better than a lower proportion. Tough little bastards, our youth!

In 1962, when the first Spider-Man comic appeared, the notion of making his alter ego a New York City kid was unobjectionable. We were an innocent country then, not yet familiar with assassinations, urban riots and terrorist attacks. Putting fantasy into a real-world setting seemed a cool idea.

Now, with all that behind us and documentaries showing the mayhem of 9/11 appearing on CBS and HBO, simulated violence in New York is a lot less defensible.

Oh please. Not this "innocent country" crap again. Dave. Boobalah! You may have been innocent. The country was not innocent! Heaven knows New York City was not innocent. Paleocon social critic Thomas Fleming of Chronicles once opined that it was all over, morals-wise, for the Big Apple by 1800. (Note: America wasn't innocent in 1800 either.) And Dave, if you read any of those comics instead of just having a research assistant look up Spiderman's creation date for you, you'd know that that comic and others dealt with those assassinations and urban riots while they were going on! Why? We'll get to that.

The sheer bizarreness of Broder's claim that somehow the calamity, the outrage that was the September massacres makes it "less defensible" to make a superhero's alter ego a "New York City kid" shows just how completely he fails to understand where superheroes come from and why they attract us.

But there are long minutes where the demented villain -- a corporate mogul, not a Middle Eastern terrorist -- is flying his jet-powered aerial sled through the canyons of New York office towers, blowing out windows, cracking walls, crashing cornices onto terrorized pedestrians and causing the kind of chaos we saw, as Morgenstern said, all too recently.

The heroine perches on a shattered balcony afraid to jump. When she finally lets go, in a moment painfully evocative of the World Trade Center jumpers, Spider-Man is there to grab her. Would that it were so.

Yes, you dolt! Would that it were fucking so! It's so simple that even a respected major media columnist with decades of tenure ought to be able to understand it: We don't crave heroes to defend us from the things that don't threaten us. Does David Broder think that Bob Kane had an instant hit with Batman because those innocent Americans of the thirties and forties didn't fear urban gangland crime? Would Broder please, then, explain film noir? Does he think Superman caught on because those same Americans weren't anxious about technology, space and scientific progress -sources, not just of Superman, but of so many of the menaces Superman combatted?

Superheroes honor our fears. What's uncanny is the extent to which a movie completed before 9/11 so eerily honors our fears after that awful day. Here are some words you'd think Broder could have fit into his sixteen inches somewhere: catharsis, irony, bittersweet.

This is the point where you might expect Unqualified Offerings to say something macho like, "If I ever start sounding so stupid, put a bullet in my head." Forget that! If I ever start sounding so stupid, give me a sinecure at a major daily with a matching salary and too much face time on theoretically-respectable television. So long as none of you actually listen to me, there will be no harm done.

I thought about the conversation with a child psychologist in Williamsburg, Va., who explained that the young people she sees in her practice are so accustomed to high-speed violent confrontations on TV and in the movies they watch that they almost literally cannot stay calm enough to read or study or sit in a classroom.

"Spider-Man" would not be "a hoot" to her.

And Raymond Chandler could tell you why!

SturdierPost.Com Dept. - My, but the Washington Post's columnist page is a rich source of material today! Any libertarian blogger worth the name should be able to get several items out of it, especially if that blogger happens to be feeling chatty.

First off, the always reliable Mary McGrory, from the assisted-living wing of liberal punditry. Her column is about, well, that's the part that people will misunderstand. She talks about government lawyers and Coleen Rowley and Robert Mueller and George Tenet, and the way the government failed to stop actual terrorists before the fact while detaining possible non-terrorists afterward. Orrin Judd takes out after McGrory for the cognitive dissonance of blaming the FBI for not aggressively detaining terror suspects before 9/11 AND for aggressively detaining terror suspects after 9/11. This just shows, I am afraid, that Judd completely misunderstood the point of McGrory's column, as seen in this passage:

I know it is risky -- and no end presumptuous -- to speak for the dead. But I am tempted beyond my strength by a coincidence. The first awarding of the Elliot Richardson Prize for excellence in public service, in honor of the peerless public servant from Boston, occurred at a moment of explosive revelations about current government lawyers. Richardson's fourth and last Cabinet post was attorney general. He quit rather than fire special prosecutor Archibald Cox -- and saved the nation.

I feel sure my old friend Elliot Richardson would salute Coleen Rowley, the general counsel of the Minnesota FBI office who blew the whistle on the constipated thinking of her superiors.

McGrory's core concern in this column is to make sure everyone knows that she was Elliott Richardson's friend. Can Orrin Judd deny it?