Imitation Tech Blog Item - The browser world was really stagnating there for awhile. Opera was stuck on version 7.11 for dog years, and Mozilla Firebird hasn't had a dot-release since 0.6.1 came out in July. But now Opera 7.2 is out, and Mozilla Thunderbird - Firebird's companion e-mail program - has advanced from 0.1 to 0.2, with 0.3 on the way.
Opera 7.2 has a very cool trick for website owners: bring up your side and press Shift-F11 - Opera will toggle to "small-screen view," showing you what your site would look like on a PDA. Apparently, Unqualified Offerings scales pretty gracefully.
Thunderbird is functional. There's just enough about it that I don't like to keep me from using it, though. The present, pre-release version seems to be light on rules for handling incoming mail - I haven't found a way to shunt certain subjects or return addresses to folders other than the in-box, for instance.
I'd like to ditch Outlook Express. I'm going to give M2, the Opera mail client, another look. There is of course no Internet Explorer development news to report. IE really was the best browser for Windows users a year or two ago. Now it's only good for running Movable Type.
Last Out in Blogger Inside Baseball - Gee, the items below sound self-absorbed and waspish. That'll be enough of that! Tune in tomorrow for good cheer and fellowship.
You Like Me, You Really Like Me! III - Yes, it's blogger inside baseball night at Unqualified Offerings. Sorry.
Arthur Silber has a substantial, and angry response to the William Sjostrom article discussed in the item below this one. I'm not actually angry myself, and hope I don't sound it in the item below. I completely endorse Arthur's general thesis, though I didn't read William Sjostrom's item as maliciously intended. (I didn't even read it as sucking up to Glenn Reynolds for a link, and believe me, I interpret a lot of "Glenn was right!" posts that way.) I wasn't even offended at being called a "lefty." If you can be a "lefty" and also complain that the Administration's actions in Iraq ignore the insights of FA Hayek, argue that preemptive war sucks because it's too much like gun control and state flat out that property rights are human rights, then I'll be a lefty.
It sometimes amuses me that I'm probably on more liberal blogrolls than conservative ones these days. This is a minor irony of history. The nimble libertarian has to decide where the most imminent threats to liberty reside and align himself accordingly. Waco and Ruby Ridge were a decade ago. ClintonCare was defeated about the same time, though great chunks of it have been smuggled into law piecemeal, as much by Republicans as by Democrats. Republicans control the White House, the House of Representatives and the Senate. Since the Spring of 2002 it has been clear to me that the "national greatness" "conservatives" had successfully hijacked the war against the terrorists who murdered three thousand blameless Americans in Fall 2001, turning it into the drive for the "benevolent hegemony" that they had been urging since the day the Soviet Union exhibit opened in the Museum of Bad Ideas. I believe their success, and even the sustained attempt, would mean the ruin of what I love best about my country. I could be wrong. But I don't think I am.
That means that the national greatness types, and the Administration whose foreign and "defense" policy they drive, are the salient threat to liberty in America today. For the time being, "the Left" simply doesn't pose an equivalent threat. In addition, this Administration stinks in all sorts of other ways important to libertarians. It stinks on trade, it stinks on spending, it stinks on drug prohibition, civil liberties and even federalism. It has not, to the best of my knowledge, even proposed the elimination of any significant programs, let alone actually eliminating any. It has driven up the price of my catfish, lumber, produce and steel. It has interfered with state prerogatives on drug laws and marriage rights.
In short, in areas (political economy and civil liberties) where a Democratic Administration would surely stink, it has stunk nearly as bad. In areas where it has stunk most (national "security"), the Democrats might stink marginally less. This doesn't mean I'll vote for a Democratic presidential candidate - I'll probably vote Libertarian again. But I'll probably hope for a divided government, with a Democratic President and a Republican Congress. As rulers of the country, the Repubs make a great opposition party. They'll kill expansive proposals from a Democratic President just to make liberals cry. It's clear that they won't take much initiative to actually reduce government beyond that.
But the upshot of it is, right now a bad Republican President is in the White House, with a Republican Congress to roll over and play fetch. They're the problem, and their vainglories and malfeasance the inevitable focus of this blog. That makes me more fun for liberals to read than I'm likely to be during the years of the Clark Administration. They can decide that I've "really gone downhill" when that happens. Bill Clinton made me a libertarian. Thanks to George Bush and Dick Cheney and the PNAC gang, I feel more libertarian and less conservative than ever.
You Like Me, You Really Like Me! II - William Sjostrom recalled what I wrote about ressentiment and administration apologists after Glenn Reynolds grew concerned about what critics of the betrayal of Valerie Plame by the White House might or might not have said about Philip Agee back in the 1970s - the ones that were old enough to follow the news, anyway.
Then Sjostrom notes the semi-incredible fact that the LA Times chose to publish an op-ed on Plame Game by Agee himself this morning, which would be rather like asking O.J. Simpson to provide commentary on the Laci Peterson case, which, come to think of it, didn't some TV network actually do that?
From this, Sjostrom draws the curious conclusion that
Not being a reputable economist like Sjostrom, I can't really see the logic here. I could only agree that Old William was "silly" if it followed that[Initially, I] reluctantly had to agree with lefty blogger Jim Henley that it was unfair to target most current leftists over an event of 1969.
Silly me. I should have known better.
1. The LA Times somehow stands for "most current leftists."
2. Its decision to publish an op-ed amounts to an endorsement of Agee's actions in the 1970s.
3. The point of my original item was all about fairness to leftists.
4. What any given person felt about Agee had anything whatsoever to do with the objective importance of high government officials burning a clandestine services officer.
Near as I can tell, the only one that comes within even sniffing distance of being the case is 2. 2 is an important one, for sure. But Agee is probably not the worst person to get op-ed page space in an American newspaper. It may even be a misstatement that "the LA Times actually drags Agee out" - Agee may have submitted the article on his own initiative. Should the LA Times have run it? I would. The job of an editorial page is to be interesting, and it's interesting to have the man who did so much to inspire the Statute of the Day commenting on the scandal of the day. I'd for damn sure run response op-eds by Agee's critics, too - even more interesting. Controversy! It sells papers. (Remind me to blog a response to Agee's article after dealing with current business. Were I running the LAT, I'd also have included a factual article to run alongside Agee's article to provide more than just his side of his story.)
The LAT runs a blistering attack by Susan Estrich on its "Schwartztober Surprise" article on the same op-ed page. Does that mean it endorses Estrich's criticism? Does it mean "most current leftists" endorse Estrich's criticism? (I'm thinking not.) It ran a Max Boot op-ed the day before. By doing so, did it show approval of Boot's 2001 regret that the US had not suffered more casualties in the Afghan War? I'm thinking not.
Is there any justification in leaping from the LAT's decision to run an article by Philip Agee to an assumption that "most current leftists" approve of what Agee did? Really, this one isn't hard. The answer is no.
Was my original article about how right wingers should be "fair to leftists?" Not really. It was about ressentiment - about being so obsessed with some real or perceived antagonist that your very habits of thought become the prisoner of that obsession. We've long known that the ranks of the left are full of people whose chief concern is being against whatever conservatives are for because conservatives are bad, bad people. Among other things, it means that, when one of their own gets his fingers or his dick caught in a scandal, their concern is less "What is the truth here?" than "Will this make our enemies happy?" When Democrats controlled the Presidency and half or all of the Congress it was easy to imagine that this was purely a liberal problem. Hey, that's what Neitszche said! Now that Republicans control the Presidency and both houses of Congress it's clear that ressentiment goes both ways.
Lastly, let's imagine that every single "leftist" out there attacking the Administration over the betrayal of Valerie Plame loved Philip Agee. Would it make any difference? To how we thought of every single leftist out there, yes. To the scandal itself, No! This can't be stressed strongly enough: what matters is the factual question of whether "senior administration officials" burned a clandestine employee of the CIA, a risk to national security, the ruin of the career and/or a violation of the felony code.
What I was saying was that Glenn Reynolds, in the post in question, was letting his resentment of "the left" distract him from what mattered and that, moreover, he was representative of his ilk (pro-administration hawks). I may have been right or I may have been wrong, and William Sjostrom may have been right or wrong to "reluctantly agree" with me at the time. But the LA Times' decision to run an op-ed by Philip Agee simply doesn't speak to the issue.
[Better line of attack, if anyone's looking for one: How can you say that one outlet's decision to give Philip Agee a soapbox has nothing to do with the attitudes of "the left" in general, while one sentence in an unusually tortuous Glenn Reynolds post somehow is representative of - hawks? "the right?" "Neos?" Whatever your pet term is today, Jim. Then I have to go digging up other examples of ressentiment among Those People while William Sjostrom collects current statements by liberals in support of Philip Agee. No fun for anybody, but at least I'm not the one who has to read all the liberals.]
You Like Me, You Really Like Me! - Chad Orzel says I've written "the worst item header since this [Plame Game] broke." (I'd like to thank the academy . . . ) But he's a liberal.
Unqualified Offerings Gets Results! - No, Clifford May hasn't told us who his anonymous source on Valerie Plame's occupation was, but Alan David Doane has accepted that it's not that hard to run a weblog and started a pure-blog successor to his defunct Comic Book Galaxy site. Among other things, it looks like the new edition will leave him feeling freer to blog on non-comics topics when the mood takes him.
Even the Sane Can Be Crazy Sometimes - One weakness in Tom Maguire's coverage of Plame Game - he's way too quick to accept Robert Novak's self-serving assertion that the CIA spokesperson didn't try very hard to get him not to help his sources betray Valerie Plame. Novak has a clear interest in denigrating the effort made to warn him off the story, and we're getting less his account of the facts here than his purported judgment. ("It was a very weak request.")
Bruce Rolston points out that once Novak brought the name to the Agency, the CIA's options were mostly bad. The one they chose, per Bruce's convincing case, was the best one they had. It just didn't work. The actual factual assertion in Novak's account that "They said if her name was printed, it might be difficult if she was traveling abroad, and they said they would prefer I didn't use her name," seems like good enough reason, since Novak has to know that headquarters people do travel.
TTFN - Gonna read some comics. Will blog in the next day or two about how they provide crucial insight into the dynamics of the Plame Blame scandal and provide further evidence that Clifford May is a silly, silly man. Meanwhile, the sanest blogging on Plame Game is coming from two sources: on the left, Mark Kleiman; from the right, Tom Maguire - far saner than the giddy if hopefully vivacious outbursts you'll find here. I've concentrated primarily on the counter-dumbass beat. They've been providing more comprehensive coverage - judicious but opinionated.
Which reminds me - anyone nostalgic for the good old days of gnawing fear and serial murder in our Capital region is invited to check out the UO archives from last October. Proudest moment: I believe I was the first person, in big media or small, to declare that the handwriting on the published ransom note must have been that of John Lee Malvo rather than John Muhammad.
We, uh, won't bring up the white van.
The Art of Football - Actual search result that brought someone to this site:
collage football playbooks
Yeah the funny search engine results post is a blogger cliche, but it's not about Valerie Plame!
Over to You, Cliff! - Reader Jonathan Hendry points me to a TNR online debate between Spencer Ackerman and Clifford May. Jonathan notes that
But I was more interested in this part, by May about the "six journalists" who got thte calls in July:TNR's guy Ackerman went first. May responded, in a way that made it clear he either didn't read Ackerman's post, or else he has no more talking points than were in his original column. Ackerman mentioned the 'everybody knows her' thing, then May's 'response' just restated his original claim almost verbatim as if Ackerman hadn't seen it yet.
Exactly, Cliff! So tell us:I know reporters protect their sources--but should they even protect criminals or those with criminal intent?
Which "someone who formerly worked in the government" told you, in the first half of July 2003, that Valerie Plame worked for the CIA?
I asked last night, but since I now know that you agree with me on the gravity of this matter, I'm asking again. "supplanter-at-highclearing.com," as stated to the left there. I promise to get the word out for you.
Stop Covering for Your Anonymous Source! - I mean NRO's Clifford May, author of the silly "No biggie, everybody knew Valerie Plame worked for the CIA" article that has become one of the sacred texts of the Administration's defenders. Yes, I've kicked this dog before, but I'm feeling ornery.
Pause just for a second to ponder another aspect of May's credulity. (Or is it disingenuousness?) May says 'What also might be worth asking: "Who didn't know?" ' that Plame worked for the CIA.
When you read his column, the entire basis for the rhetorical question is:
One guy told May that Plame was a CIA operative. One guy:
That's it. One guy. After that he heads out for "Joseph Wilson is a BAAAD man" territory At no point does May claim to have heard of Plame's job from so much as a single other person. Nor does he tell us in just what capacity his one guy "formerly worked in the government."That wasn't news to me. I had been told that — but not by anyone working in the White House. Rather, I learned it from someone who formerly worked in the government and he mentioned it in an offhand manner, leading me to infer it was something that insiders were well aware of.
Hesiod thinks May's source is Richard Perle. That would be fun. But who knows?
Oh right - Clifford May knows! So, Clifford May: your anonymous source may have committed a felony by disclosing the identity of a covert intelligence officer. A key question is, per statute, whether his security clearance meant that he was authorized to know Plame's function. The public and the Justice Department need to know who your source is - the Justice Department so it can consider prosecuting him, or finding the person who told him, the public so we can judge "Who didn't know?" Because we can't tell from your article.
One more fact that can be pulled, wriggling, from May's column:
There's that word again - operative. May does not say that his source called May "just an analyst" or an overt employee. May repeats Novak's original word. He not only doesn't correct it - his phrasing is tantamount to independent confirmation that the leakers and reporters knew that Plame was a clandestine CIA employee.On July 14, Robert Novak wrote a column in the Post and other newspapers naming Mr. Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, as a CIA operative.
That wasn't news to me. I had been told that . . .
Good thing the conservative media has more than one reporter!
Explainer Explains - From Slate:
Yes, it's silly to have to link this, but with all the blather among the apologist about all the ways Plame's burning wasn't important, it's crucial to remind people - it's important. Pay particular attention to the passage about why Plame's cover remained important even if she had had her last overseas assignment.Why is it such a big deal that someone outed Valerie Plame? For starters, it's a felony. And Plame was also reportedly a NOC with years of experience investigating weapons of mass destruction. If this is true, her discovery could compromise intelligence operations she was involved with around the world, which would explain why she maintained her nonofficial cover even when she was back in the United States. "Hard target" countries like China and North Korea often keep records of every known meeting between Americans and their scientists and officials. Almost certainly, those lists would have been frantically reviewed when Plame's identity was revealed, and any sources she recruited could have been exposed.
Plame! I Want to Live Forever! - The "confused" declare their stupefaction that "senior administration officials" would try to get back at a "non-entity" like Joseph Wilson in such a crude and, they sort of admit, inappropriate way. It doesn't strike me as that confusing, and yet there's a chance that the official Unqualified Offerings motto comes into play here:
That's not nearly paranoid enough. My alternate theory is worse.
Recall the bureaucratic atmosphere of early summer. I wrote about it in June, during the time of recriminations about the quality of the intelligence used to make the case for war:
The Blair people and the Bush people were muttering, not so sotto voce, that yes, there may have been some over-estimates in the stuff those darn intelligence agencies handed them. SOTU. "16 words." "CIA Approved!" The intelligence people responded with I'm not taking the rap for this one! - not for attribution, mind you.Note also that the leaks from Anglosphere intelligence officials are coming fast and furious these days, in Britain and here. It's dangerous business for politicians to try to set up intelligence agencies as fall guys. Intelligence agencies know things. And they care more about their own political health than yours. Didn't Watergate start to go sour on Nixon when the White House tried to scapegoat the CIA?
And in early July, Joseph Wilson's op-ed about the Niger trip appears.
Now, if you're in the "with us or against us" crowd at the White House, might you not conclude that Wilson's column was as much a CIA "assignment" as Wilson's original trip? From your perspective, the CIA sent Wilson to Niger; it can just as easily request, on the quiet, that he let the world know about that trip a year and a half later.
In that context, the burning of Plame looks less like a dig at Wilson than a counterstrike on CIA itself - or, if you will, a shot across the bow of George Tenet. We can really make life hell for you people - not nebulous "possible whistleblowers" but the Agency itself and its management. Of course, you do this by making it harder for the Agency to do its job, which is, you know, collecting intelligence, tracking nuclear, biological and chemical weapons and stuff like that. The alternate theory makes the leakers look much worse somehow. I do not endorse it myself yet. But maybe it's less "confusing."
Virtually Norman - Norman is a Norwegian company that has, per an infected friend's recommendation, better information and curative re the Swen virus than the big American firms. Swen comes to you in the form of an e-mail from "Microsoft," complete with trademarked Microsoft graphics, which tells you that attached is a critical security patch that fixes blahblahblah holes etc. I can't give you the exact wording because, on receiving the e-mail, I reflected on why "Microsoft" would be e-mailing me security patches instead of pinging the Automatic Updates taskbar feature like it has for every single previous security patch. After reflecting I did a properties check on the e-mail return addy, deleted the e-mail and emptied my Deleted Items folder.
Swen strikes me as particularly obnoxious since the creator(s) can't even pretend to be "exposing flaws in the operating system." All they're doing is taking advantage of less suspicious users. To those who would say that this too is a valuable lesson, I reply a) if it were so valuable, people would pay you to teach them, and they're not; b) all the fancy computer stuff that power users have is made possible because the user community extends so far beyond the cognoscenti. Without the people you're implicitly deriding by sending Swen around there wouldn't be the economies of scale that makes the internet as we know it and hardware as we enjoy it possible. So, like, fuck you guys.
Your Only Plame L - Oh, Who Am I Kidding? - Ted Barlow lays it out so clearly that even a "confused" warblogger can understand it. Short, sweet and grammatical.
Also, via Atrios, former CIA employee Larry Johnson, who among other things is listed as a Fox News contributor, tells the NewsHour that Valerie Plame "has been under cover for three decades."
But I still can't square the plain facts of this story with my dearly-held illusions about the White House! Sorry, Mr. Confused Warblogger. As JFK said, life's not fair.
Oh by the way, confused warblogger guys? Bill Clinton was guilty of perjury and should have been impeached. Just thought I'd mention.
UPDATE: Doh! I mean convicted by the Senate. It's been awhile.
Nutshell Guide - From Juan Cole:
And that is the greatest irony of all. Ms. Plame, who really was working to stop the spread of weapons of mass destruction, has been ruined by persons who only pretended to do so for political gain, and whose invasion of Iraq did nothing to make the US one whit safer.
Your Only Plame Game Link of the Day - Okay, that's almost certainly a lie - but it's the only one you need. (Via Crooked Timber.)
Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is? - Plame Game apologists have been linking to a Clifford May article on NRO in which he claims, basically, that "everybody knew" that Valerie Plame "worked for the CIA."
Oh, no biggie then. Here's the thing, though. The context of May's article makes it overwhelmingly likely just when May learned this - either while researching a July 11 NRO article attacking Wilson and other critics of the Administrations WMD case, or between the publication of that article and Novak's column. As May notes, Novak's column ran on July 14. May published a second column about Wilson on July 18.That wasn't news to me. I had been told that — but not by anyone working in the White House. Rather, I learned it from someone who formerly worked in the government and he mentioned it in an offhand manner, leading me to infer it was something that insiders were well aware of.
In other words, it's entirely possible that May's informant "who formerly worked in the government" doesn't refute the existence of the smear operation; rather, he was part of it. (Hesiod thinks he knows who the someone is.)
You gotta love: He said it in an offhand manner! No former government official who is connected enough to know whose wives work for the CIA and who had information relevant to my article on a hot, breaking issue would ever try to pique my interest by mentioning something in "an offhand manner!"
Say this for May, though: he didn't use the information, even if he didn't quite realise why he was getting it. Naive, but not especially vile, is how I promise to think of him.
Further Reading - Transcript of today's Crossfire, from which Matt Drudge pulled Robert Novak's opening statement. (See a couple of items below.)
But Wait! There's More! - Come to think of it, a fun Washington fact I learned years ago from my buddy Toiler, who really is an analyst for the CIA. If someone asks him where he works, he has to tell them he works for the CIA. He is not to lie or dodge the question. Why? So he won't ruin it for the people that do have to lie or dodge the question.
This is about the millionth reason to believe that Valerie Plame really was employed in the Agency's clandestine services division: in all the times that Wilson, who surely knows the rules, and spokesmen for the White House and CIA have been asked about Plame's employment, they have not said, "She's an analyst." But if she were indeed an analyst, that's what they would say. So, can we please retire the Administration apologist defense "we don't know whether Plame was really a 'covert' employee or not"?
Thanks, guys. Go back to complaining about Iraqi media coverage or something.
Leave Me My Illusions! - Until recently I could believe that ressentiment was a malady unique to the Left. Damn the Bush Administration for stealing that, too. Glenn Reynolds in a long, Pooh-Bearlike item on Plame Game:
How. weird. My big concern is less what happened here than what some leftie may not have said thirty years ago, assuming said leftie was born or out of training pants back then, which is unlikely in the case of, oh, Hesiod, though Kevin Drum doesn't look all that fresh-faced. Anyway, my point is, before we can decide what we think about anything, we have to ask ourselves if that decision will make some liberal, somewhere, happy. That must be resisted at any cost.This seems like a case of manufactured outrage to me. I rather doubt that most of the people who are so exercised here were condemning that hero of the antiwar left, Philip Agee, who really did put lives in danger.
Annals of Big Government - Jessica Mathews in the Post today:
When I think that this war numbers among its supporters people who have read, admire and claim to understand Friedrich Hayek - well, if I had a webcam you could see me shake my head.At CPA planners are deep into nearly every crevice of national government, from the postal service to tax policy, from finance to telling Iraqi teachers how they could teach better. A lot of this could be and should be left to Iraqis to decide eventually, even if we're convinced that we know better. Our delegation was told of the need for "unified command and control at the political/economic level." We should know better.
Condign Punishment - In his actual column today, Robert Novak reports on the current, less optimistic mood at the Bush White House re the 2004 elections. Now some Repubs are wondering not How can Bush lose? but How can Bush win? Some stuff about electoral maps. But the big concern is fundraising:
Two cheers for Main Street Republicanism, which is maybe not dead yet! Okay, one cheer. And keep in mind that there are many news cycles to turn over between now and November 2004. But if conservatives continue to notice that there's nothing conservative about this administration's national "security" policy and not much that's conservative about its economic policy either (tariffs, prescription drug entitlements), then GWB's electoral apple may not fall far from the GHWB tree.Dramatic deterioration in the outlook over the last two weeks is reflected in the experience by a Republican businessman in Milwaukee trying to sell $2,000 tickets for Bush's only appearance this year in Wisconsin Oct. 3. In contrast to money flowing easily into the Bush war chest everywhere until now, he encountered stiff resistance. Well-heeled conservative businessmen offered to write a check for $100 or $200, but not $2,000. They gave one reason: Iraq.
The clamp on their wallets, they said, derived from their feeling that Iraq was "an albatross," and that "there is no end in sight." The performance by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld particularly came under fire. The U.N. speech made matters worse, in the eyes of these non-contributors, with the president going "hat in hand" to the General Assembly.
In fact, Bush was not begging at the U.N., but this mistaken impression reflects a breakdown in the White House propaganda machine.
A Fanboy's Labor-Saving Device - I would have written exactly the same demolition Sean Collins wrote of that comic-book equivalent of stadium rock, the recently concluded "Hush" storyline in Batman, except that
o I'm just not that gonzo funny;
o I had the sense to bail on the series several months ago.
The good news is, even if you were even more sensible than I was, and never started it in the first place, you can still enjoy Sean's . . . valediction.
Parse of a Hole - Fun with English Grammar. Compare this sentence
with this one:Nobody in the Bush administration called me to leak this.
Different, huh? Naturally, the first is what Matt Drudge reports Robert Novak as saying. (Hat tip to Atrios.)Nobody in the Bush administration leaked this to me.
The Drudge link will decay. The text attributed to Novak runs
Strange that Novak called her an "operative" in his July column that begat the whole Plame Game scandal:Nobody in the Bush administration called me to leak this. In July I was interviewing a senior administration official on Ambassador Wilson's report when he told me the trip was inspired by his wife, a CIA employee working on weapons of mass destruction. Another senior official told me the same thing. As a professional journalist with 46 years experience in Washington I do not reveal confidential sources. When I called the CIA in July to confirm Mrs. Wilson's involvement in the mission for her husband -- he is a former Clinton administration official -- they asked me not to use her name, but never indicated it would endanger her or anybody else. According to a confidential source at the CIA, Mrs. Wilson was an analyst, not a spy, not a covert operator, and not in charge of undercover operatives...
I should say that I like Robert Novak. (This was not always true.) He does reporting, unlike a lot of columnists, and he was one of the few national pundits in the 1990s who expressed any concern whatsoever about the increasing militarization of federal law enforcement. He's wrongheaded about drugs, but scarcely worse than the rest of the media.Wilson never worked for the CIA, but his wife, Valerie Plame, is an Agency operative on weapons of mass destruction. Two senior administration officials told me Wilson's wife suggested sending him to Niger to investigate the Italian report.
Fair and Balanced - Bits of news this antiwar, pro-market weblog briefly acknowledges with the intention of coming back to later:
US poverty rate increases over last year.
Polls show most Iraqis think the invasion was worth it to get rid of Saddam.
(Re the latter, Newsday's analysis will also be worth going into.)
Cry Me a River - From Middle East Newsline:
Well neener neener neener! This is great news even if it isn't true - what matters is that al Qaeda leaders think it's true. (Extra layer of intrigue: the statement itself may be a US plant - reports on the sourcing are rather vague. But if a planted statement sows doubt in al Qaeda minds, then it has worked.)LONDON [MENL] -- Al Qaida has warned its agents that the Islamic insurgency movement has been infiltrated by the United States.
An unidentified Al Qaida spokesman has warned that Al Qaida forces in Iraq appear to have been infiltrated by the United States in cooperation with unspecified Arab intelligence services. The spokesman, in a statement relayed by the London-based Center for Islamic Research and Studies, urged followers to identify and kill suspected infiltrators.
Theory that must be considered: the statement is authentic, but al Qaeda is kidding - that is, they want the US to think it's infiltration attempts have been successful when in fact our various assets have been brought under al Qaeda control. Reason to just about dismiss this theory: the statement will tend to promote a witch hunt atmosphere within the organization's ranks. That's an awfully high, and foreseeable, price to pay forslightly confusing US intelligence.
More important is to infiltrate al Qaeda outside Iraq. Hopefully the US is either on that case or is prepared to be patient with any infiltration sucesses they've had within Iraq - to let an undercover operative work his way slowly through the organization. The temptation to stick to rolling up networks in Iraq will be great.
Plame On - Hey, what's that wine-dark cloud roiling the political waters? Why - I do believe it's blood.
I also believe that, when this story initially surfaced during the summer, among the few hawks that acknowledged it, one explanation advanced was that Plame probably wasn't really a CIA officer, a low-level asset at best, if that.
This isn't a current events blog - it's a politics blog, which is something else entirely - so I'll direct you to Daniel Drezner, Tom Maguire, Mark A. Kleiman, Josh Marshall and humorist Roger Simon.
UPDATE: Bruce Baugh e-mails
It should be an impeachable offense to act in any way which makes it at all likely that any senior member of the administration can be found in circumstances under which it would make sense to say "And I would have got away with it if it weren't for you meddling kids!"
Liberty and Union! And - Outfits! - As mentioned in the fitness blog item below, I have been inveigled into "experimenting" with civil war reenactment. As I am not quite 43 yet, I will later claim this for a youthful indiscretion. My big day is October 18 at Cedar Creek in the Shenandoah Valley, when I join the Brady Sharpshooters (of some Connecticut regiment or other) at the behest of my buddy the author, Michael Schaffner. (Poetry? Prose? He's got you covered.)
Yesterday we did a five-mile conditioning hike along the W&OD trail in Herndon. My new comrades were able to fit me out with everything except pants and a pack - including period shoes and an Enfield rifle. I'm here to tell you: we have better shoes now. I'm pretty sure we have better guns too.
What did I learn on my hike, besides the authorized positions in which to carry your rifle and the authorized ways to move it from one to the other? That reenactors are, fundamentally, women. As Michael and the guys, who have a great sense of humor about their hobby, for all that they clearly love it, put it:
How much are you wearing, I asked Captain Bill before we set out?We talk about clothes. We shop for clothes. We talk about shopping. We talk about what other people are wearing. We gossip.
"You mean, how much weight?"
"No," I said. "How much money?"
The answer appeared to be, in the low thousands of dollars. Uniform components about a grand, of which the shoes were, IIRC, the single biggest expense; "kit" about another grand, with a rifle accounting for about half that expense and the rest going to the backpack, ancillary bags, canteen etc. Because the Brady Sharpshooters are Union reenactors, they get off cheap. Confederate reenactors have to buy a complete Union outfit to participate in the hobby - there are many more confederate reenactors than union ones, so many events can take place only if a certain number of rebels are "galvanized" into yankee units. A Union reenactor doesn't have to buy Confederate gear unless he wants to occasionally swing that way.
I'll tell you what, though. After you've been marching for 45 minutes, water tastes really good coming out of one of those canteens.
Weekly Fitness Blog Item - Weight 165 pounds, waist just over 33". Stalled, basically. I'd love to lose five more pounds of fat, but they ain't coming off so far. This was Bad Boy Week too - I skipped all my aerobics sessions except one, imagining to make it all up with
The Andersonville Diet - Actually, this overstates the privation I experienced Saturday morning. I didn't miss any meals. But I did go on a five-mile hike with my friend Michael Schaffner's civil war reenactment buddies, and I did wear Union bluecoat and blouse, canteens, bags, belts and period shoes, and I toted an Enfield rifle. Next time you get into an argument about the Causes of the American Civil War, consider the possibility that everyone was just really hot and sweaty and it made them short-tempered.
Here's a useful article on how to keep your office workspace diet-friendly.
Fitness Blog of the Soul - I admire author, editor and game designer Bruce Baugh a lot, likely more than he admires himself. His perspective on his life and health is the impetus behind his new weblog. This very personal blog takes off from Dante's famous opening of the Inferno, about having travelled half of our life's way. It will cover diet, work, health, emotion and more.
In other fitness blogs - Actually, it's getting kind of lonely. People either aren't posting at all or aren't posting about their regimens.
Ask and Ye Shall Receive - Thanks to the kindness of Mr. Bruce Baugh, I'm now a paid-up member of Rock Scissors Blog - at least, I assume the others paid the same as I did (nothin'). Bruce has invited me and unspecified others to help liven the place up, so if it's hot abstruse RPG theory you're looking for, stop on by. My inaugural post is up and others will follow. Ironists may find some amusement that not only does this mean I'm back on blogger - on a blogspot blog yet - but with a blog that uses the blogger template I've made fun of repeatedly.
On the other hand, no one has stepped forward to bankroll my national chain of comic book stores yet. But it's the weekend.
We're Here, We're Queer Marriage Bloggers, Get Used to It - Joining the discussion are actual gay guy Alan Sullivan of Fresh Bilge and straight married woman Sappho of Nole Irritare Leones - also a disquisition on gender roles and bullying by Camassia. Every one of them is worth reading. Brief responses:
I'll pretty much sign on to every word of Camassia's item (which does not address the issue(s) of same-sex marriage itself).
Alan writes, "Ecclesiastical law is none of my business. Disapproval is not discrimination." I completely agree. I'd be against any attempt to get the government to force churches to marry gay couples regardless of doctrine, even if that were constitutional. But as it stands now, a church that wants to marry gay couples - and they exist - finds that those particular sacraments don't have the force of law that their joining of straight couples does. So in addition to everything else, the prohibition of SSM limits freedom of religion. I'm probably more in tune with the remarks of Tim Hulsey in his comments section than with Alan's argument itself, but I liked this part: "I really don't care whether some yahoo fundamentalist dislikes gays. If he throws a rock through the window over my desk, however, he may get shot."
Sappho just about squares the liberal circle on gender roles. She also - yikes! - drops some actual data into the discussion. (No, I haven't studied the study yet.)