What Might Make Me Vote for Bush After All despite never having voted for a Republican Presidential candidate in my life? The juvenile "Googlebombing" trend among liberal bloggers. (Et tu, Matt?) Is that really more important than the Administration's baleful record on fiscal and martial prudence? Don't tempt me.

Happy Anniversary - Two years ago in Unqualified Offerings:

If the plan before September was to provoke a US response, bring down the Musharraf government and, if possible, make off with one or more Pakistani nukes in the confusion, the plan has not yet failed.

From "Thinking Like a Terrorist."

Today, in The Dawn:

The minister was of the view that the recent attempts on the president's life were not aimed at sabotaging the peace initiative taken by Pakistan with India and the Saarc summit scheduled to be held in Islamabad from Jan 4, 2004. He, however, said the attacks were made in reaction to President Musharraf's pragmatic stand on war against terrorism.

"Those who wanted to impose their own ideology in the country are obviously unhappy with the government's policies," he added.

Interestingly a Times of India editorial argues that the recent assassination attempts have come because Musharraf's domestic position is more secure than ever.

I'm still inclined to the view that the Bush Administration has handled Pakistan almost as well as it could. The big faux pas was reneging on the textile import pledges (link is PDF). That was stupid and cruel, but apparently not a back-breaker.

In November 2001, the great Pakistani liberal, columnist Kamran Shafi, finding himself in the odd position of defending Pervez Musharraf, speculated that "the stark choice given our General" was "probably accompanied by hints about the exact map coordinates of where our bums were hidden" ("bums" being Shafi's derogatory slang for Pakistan's nukes).

I sure hope we still have those coordinates. That's the real war and has been for two years now.

Do the Math like Radley Balko did.

Here We Go A'Caroling - Eric of Off Wing Opinion has a list of his favorite "non-traditional" Christmas songs. ("Non-traditional?" What's the Yuletide without at least one listen to the Waitresses' "Christmas Rapping?") In addition to his nominees, I'd plump for "The Saint Stephen's Day Murders," by Elvis Costello and the Chieftains, and, though they probably don't count as non-traditional, the live version of "Away in a Manger" by Buddy and Julie Miller, and T-Bone Burnett and Sam Phillips' rendition of "God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen." These last two may require some, ahem, effort on your part to acquire.

Two Down, One to Go - Blogging has been light while Mrs. Offering and I prepare for Return of the King tomorrow. Christmas night was for the extended-edition DVD of Fellowship. Tonight we gave our new copy of the extended-edition Two Towers its maiden viewing.

We're ready.

Knock Me Over With A Feather - It being a holiday, I don't want to rock your world or anything. I don't think this British Journalism Review article confirming, among other things, Telegraph scribe Con Coughlin's ties to British Intelligence will do that. The report is careful to describe Coughlin as a conscientious reporter who tries to confirm what he's given. It's worth remembering that in his famous article on the "twofer memo" he stated outright that he couldn't confirm its authenticity. However, the BJR article about Coughlin's involvement in a 1995 lawsuit makes it clear that he misrepresented the source of info passed onto him by MI6, attributing claims about Muammar Gadafi's son's involvement in a counterfeiting scam to a "British banking official" when he had personally received it from "officers of MI6, who, it transpired, had been supplying Coughlin with material for years."

BJR is upset that there isn't more of a legal firewall between British Intelligence and the British press, as there is in the United States. Of the three forms of manipulation cited in the article (intelligence services recruiting journalists for intelligence work, intelligence officers posing as journalists to write articles under false names and planting stories - possibly false ones - on willing reporters who disguise the source), the first two are illegal here. The last seems impossible to prevent, though, except by universally-conscientious behavior among intelligence bureaucracies and reporters.

That'll happen.

Last point: do not imagine that these shenanigans only happen with Tory papers. Kim Philby worked for the Observer. The point of black propaganda is not just to obscure its origin but, if possible, make it look like it comes from a hostile source. So if anything, a Western intelligence service would rather plant its stories with a left wing paper. There were certainly stories that appeared in the Guardipendent during the runup to the invasion that made me wonder.

At the borders, the relationship of the press to intelligence services can be a tricky business. Intelligence officers can be important sources of real news. An ironclad "never use anything you get from a spook" rule would be absurd. But reporters have to be alert to the possibility of being played, and readers have to develop a sense of which reporters seem to be obvious shills. So, ahem, do bloggers.

(Thanks to Hesiod for the tip.)

Merry Christmas to All - Had my annual evening in church, singing beautiful songs whose truth I do not credit, with feeling. I love Christmas, the secular and the religious aspects of it. The Incarnation is a compelling story - one well worth organizing civilizations around, even if, like me, you don't believe a word of it. For God so loved the world, he gave his only begotten Son . . .

It's powerful. Awesome in the true sense. What it says about responsibility, empathy and sacrifice chastens us regardless of its facticity.

I remember what it felt like when I finally realized that the Gospels had a literary unity, even in their multiplex versions, that "laid him in a manger" (a place where food goes) foreshadowed the Easter story ("This is my body. Eat."). Christ the Shepherd and Jesus, fodder for the sheep. Then there are the notions that would probably count as heresies if entertained by a believing Christian - the Incarnation as God's "walking a mile in humanity's mocassins" before condemning it en masse to perdition, and relenting because the experience taught Him that perfect righteousness was too much to expect from his Creation. God's sacrifice of his Son as atonement for the injunction laid on Abraham.

As if. The phrase is dismissive these days, which is too bad. It was a perfectly respectable school of theology.

Loyal Readers, Merry Christmas to those of you who celebrate the holiday. And whether you celebrate or not, Peace on Earth, Good Will toward Men. I know, I know: "In whom He Is pleased." May the world go as if He is pleased with you.

Housekeeping (Blogkeeping?) - Past time to rotate the New Crew. The last batch have been ushered into their permanent homes on the UO blogroll and a dozen fresh links have been added for your enjoyment. Ask Brendan is a fellow DC libertarian, best known for his frequently hilarious advice letters. Unmistakable Marks is a liberal politics and culture blog. Off Wing Opinion specializes in sports, especially hockey. Obsidian Wings is a fine new group blog, graduates of the Tacitus School for Guest Bloggers. The Kolkata Libertarian covers politics and economics, here and on the Subcontinent, from a free-market perspective. shonk is an eclectic, philosophy-minded libertarian blog in the tradition of Julian Sanchez and Will Wilkinson, if kids like that can be said to constitute a tradition - in internet time, I think they can. Brad DeLong is a die-hard liberal economist who has been blogging for dog-years now. Haggai's Place is dovish, liberal, well-written and nicely-designed. Hey, that's three out of four! Oxblog and the Volokh Conspiracy are the Teen Titans and the JLA of neolibertarianism, respectively. Gallimaufry is the new blog of longtime Loyal Reader (and SF mafiosa) Mary Kay Kare. And speaking of SF, radical novelist Ken MacLeod blogs at The Early Days of a Better Nation. For some reason I think of him as a kind of post-Trotskyite Jesse Walker. They seem to share the same lively interest and - dare I say - affection, for political fringes well apart from their own doilies. As it were.

Welcome all. Since I was so late getting the latest batch posted, I'll leave them up until the last week in January.

Deep Breaths - Yes, the Mirror story about the Bush-Blair rift sure looks juicy. But I caution my fellow doves, and Bush Administration opponents, not to make too much of it yet. So far this is a story that has appeared in a single British newspaper, and we all know how far you can trust British newspapers. This could well be the British Left's answer to Con Coughlin.

Tis the Season! - In what will surely count as a tradition, December 31 brings the third annual Unqualified Successes, this site's annual awards presentation. Congrats to our 2001 and 2002 winners. This year I'm taking nominations. I can't promise I'm using nominations, but if you have a candidate for the repeat categories or an idea for a new category, by all means send it. Presently there is an embarrassment of riches when it comes to the "Turning Japanese" Award for (let's call them) sissyhawks. Contrariwise, Hawk of the Year looks mighty hard to fill from here. (It's supposed to be an encomium. Really.)

I caution fellow bloggers that, while some awards have gone to bloggers in the past and some will surely go to bloggers this time, the Unqualified Successes are not blog awards per se. (After all, what have blog awards and Unqualified Offerings ever had to do with each other?) So please don't be offended if your greatness goes unaccountably unacknowledged.

My Year in Comics I - Look, were I to do a "Best Comics of the Year" it would mark me as an utter fraud. I simply have not read widely enough to be qualified to put together anything like a credible list. And if anything I'm aiming to read more narrowly in the future - that is to say, dropping titles I don't enjoy. There are surely more enjoyable comics than I know exist, and that's going to remain true. Beyond that, I spent a good bit of this year in catch-up mode anyway. A lot of what was new to me was old hat to everyone else. So what follows is my 2003 highlights rather than the industry's.

Faves

Daredevil, by Bendis and Maleev. This title was one I read in the car before driving away from the shop. Say that superhero comics have become the narrow obsession of a fringe group of aging adult fans. This comic is the best at being that thing, and surely, whatever else you think the industry should be doing, there is room for one such book. I read: all this year's Bendis and Maleev monthlies and all the collections back to the start of their run. Marvel gets points off for dragging us through that tedious David Mack Echo storyline - or at least it was tedious when I stopped reading it - to round out the year. And Bendis is not great at ending stories. Getting to the end is guaranteed exhilaration, though, if you go for that stuff (crime drama, superheroics, ethical conundrums), and I go for that stuff.

Finder, by Carla Speed McNeil. Superb anthropological science fiction and terrific storytelling. The current sequence, The Rescuers, two issues along now, has the Lindbergh Baby kidnapping case as its seed. Its first issue impelled me to get as much of the rest of the series as possible, and I believe I have only two issues to go yet. Her masterpiece is the first, two-volume story, Sin-Eater. Successor volume King of the Cats lacks Sin-Eater's emotional force but is solid anthropological SF. Talisman didn't grab me. But Dream Sequence I liked nearly as much as Sin-Eater. Worth noting how good Speed McNeil is at writing about men - all kinds of them, young, old, edjicated, rustic, urbane, gay, straight. No discovery this year made me happier than Finder.

Eightball #22, by Daniel Clowes - This is like two years old or something, right? It's still the most recent issue of Daniel Clowes' "periodical" though, still pretty available, and damnably impressive. Imagine a David Lynch movie with a soul. I learned an awful lot about storytelling from this one comic.

Fantastic Four, by Waid and Weiringo (or Porter) - Unfortunately the Authoritative Action sequence seems to be getting away from author Mark Waid. It's entirely possible that the thing was conceived as an awkward "swan song" arc when he thought he was going to be leaving the book, and then he found himself stuck making it work. But until now the Waid/Weiringo run on FF has been the best of the other kind of contemporary superhero book - the kind Daredevil isn't. Waid writes good family, and that's what makes Fantastic Four go, during those periods when it is, in fact, going.

Arrowsmith, Kurt Busiek and Carlos Pacheco - Swords and sorcery above the trenches of an alternate-history Great War. I like the story, which is filled with nice touches. I love the art, by Carolos Pacheco, whose page compositions are pointfully clever and whose line has a winning grace. After Clowes, Pacheco probably did more to enrich my appreciation of comics as a medium than any other artist this year. There is still time for this book to make a horribly wrong turn into cheapness, but it hasn't happened yet.

Planetary/Batman: Night on Earth, by Warren Ellis and John Cassaday - Just a damned wonderful one-shot, in which, basically, Batman tries to charge past three investigators in an alley. Sometimes that's all you need, especially if the three investigators are the Planetary team, the alley extends through multiple dimensions and it's every version of Batman in the canon doing the charging. A real Planetary story. A great Batman story. If Warren Ellis phoned this one in, he had a hell of a good connection. And John Cassaday's art is gorgeous. Mrs. Offering does not read superhero comics and she loved this book.

Lady Constantine, by Andy Diggle and Goran Sudzuka - another favorite of Mrs. O's. Lusty supernatural derring-do in 18th-Century England and points north. Mrs. O wants more, and so do I.

League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Vol. II, by Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill - This was Mr. Hyde's series, really, a perverse thing that concluded with rough grandeur. I found the end matter text a slog and early stopped slogging. But the part with the pictures I liked a lot.

Dicks and Deedees: A Love and Rockets Book, by Jaime Hernandez - I'd been away from LnR for all the years I wasn't reading comics and wasn't sure where to jump back in when I started reading again. So this book was my first Jaime Hernandez since sometime shortly after The Death of Speedy. I loved this book. I love that Hernandez didn't freeze himself or his characters in time or age.

Better stop there or I'll have produced a Top 10 despite myself. (Alias.) Not so good stuff of 2003 coming soon.

That Said, There is GOOD Criticism Too and it comes from Bruce Baugh. His apologia for Frank Miller and Lynne Varley's The Dark Knight Strikes Again is important for more than what it says about that particular work.

Don't Be A Silly GIRL - OR Boy - Ginger Stampley and Sean Collins whack the Caryn James-Lord of the Rings pinata. And Sean Collins finds plenty more stupid critics in his entire series on the topic, including one that, well, just look at the fellow who hates the fact that the movies are a trilogy:

Whitty feels a reporter's need to dig deeper.

Of course, Tolkien set the stage himself as novelist, with his original triple-volume epic.

Gee, you think?

But even that was eventually issued in a one-volume edition.

I remember, years ago, the poet and critic David Slavitt writing that something had made him realize anew just how dumb most movie critics are. But that "one-volume edition" business is magically dumb.

Speaking of Libya - Something was tickling my memory, and sure enough, as recently as October, Ariel Sharon was complaining that "Libya is diligently attempting to acquire nuclear know-how with help and support from North Korea and Pakistan."

So, what are the odds that Ariel Sharon did not know, in October, that the US and Britain were well down the road to negotiating Libya's nuke program away? Pretty darn low, I would think.

Manners from Heaven - As a libertarian blogger, I get publicity e-mails from the Independent Institute every day, most of which go unused. But today's Ivan Eland column on the minor triumph over Quentin Crisp lookalike Muammar Qaddafi is pretty useful. Excerpt:

Although the imminent U.S. invasion may have prompted Qaddafi's feelers to bargain away his weapons efforts, Qaddafi has been trying to mend fences with the United States and the West for a decade. Five years ago, he turned over two Libyans for trial in the terrorist bombing of flight Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland in 1988; recently, he agreed to pay reparations for the incident. British Prime Minister Tony Blair admitted that Qaddafi's disarmament initiative arose from the success of those negotiations. Also, for several years Libya has eschewed terrorist attacks. And it is probably no coincidence that negotiations to end Libyan unconventional weapons programs accelerated only after the United States agreed to allow the United Nations to end economic sanctions against Libya. Qaddafi most likely wanted to see some gains from his years of efforts to reconcile with the West before he made any more concessions.

Is this version of events the certain, complete and true interpretation? It is at the very least a counter-narrative as plausible as the one the hawks are putting out. The Libyan case is a stronger argument for patient, multilateral diplomacy and international law than even I, crusty Don't Tread on Me-er that I am, am completely comfortable with.

The standard Qaddafi narrative has been, "Ever since the US bombed Qaddafi during the Reagan Administration, Qaddafi, afraid for his life and his rule, has been quiet." But that's not quite the case. The Lockerbie bombing, for which Libya has formally acknowledged responsibility, took place after the 1986 bombing. It is said to have been in retaliation for that bombing.

You may have trouble remembering our bombing of Tripoli in response to Lockerbie, much less our conquest of the country and deposition of the funny, vicious little man who ruled it. (Funny strange, as they say, not funny ha-ha.) And yet, a combination of sanctions, diplomatic isolation, police work and (I can hardly believe I am writing this) international law, compelled Qaddafi to give up his agents for trial, accept national blame for the atrocity and go on an extended begging campaign to get back in the world's good graces. The nine-months formal, secret negotiation over Libya's nuclear program looks much less like a sudden departure than the culmination of a pre-existing dynamic.

It will, of course, be interesting to learn the details of just what Libya's nuclear weapons program amounted too. The guess here is: not much.

Coda: Kevin Drum spots an important passage in the Post's coverage.

The End of All Our Wanderings shall be to return to where we began, and go Ohmigaaaaawwwwwd! Yes, the web really did look like Deja Vu ("the web as we remember it") portrays it. (Link via ooO, via WordPress.) Actually, it was not quite as spiffy. (I did my own retro design page for an RPG character site a couple of years ago.)

Let me stress that having actually surfed the web page where you could see if the coffee pot was full or not does not make me any kind of non-newbie. No. It's having used a gopher client that makes me a non-newbie. And if you're saying to yourself, "What the hell is a gopher client?" you'll never be a non-newbie. Says me! Me!

Are Women Stupid? - Of course not. You can't make such a sweeping generalization from one dumb article by a chick, any more than the author of that dumb article can sensibly conclude that "what the chick flick is to men, this trilogy is to women - or at least to a large secret society of us for whom the series is no more than a geek-fest, a technologically impressive but soulless endurance contest." She knows! She didn't like it, and she found a woman at her office who went because her boyfriend wanted to see it.

Anyway, here is the point at which I stopped reading:

The characterizations are so haphazard that the most touching figure is not the heroic hobbit Frodo or even Aragorn, technically human but more a fairy-tale king than a man. It is Frodo's sidekick, Sam, who will literally follow Frodo into fire. Sam is played so well by Sean Astin that this affectingly loyal hobbit seems the most human figure on screen.

Imagine! A Return of the King in which Samwise Gamgee is the most touching figure! It's as if Peter Jackson had read the book or something!

Okay, I'll shut up now. I see the movie next Saturday night. More after that.

Weekly Fitness Blog Item - 164 pounds, waist under 33", pants subjectively tighter. Sorry to miss last week's fitness blog item (yes - someone did notice). Numbers were the same as this week. Given the total pig I have become, that's pretty amazing. (Lunch at the legendary Jerry's Seafood in Lanham MD on Friday, and still 164 pounds.)

Need. To. Exercise. Feeling weaker now and less fit.

Catching up on some links: A Gallup poll determined that 2/3 of men and almost half of women are overweight or obese. However, only half of overweight men think it would be a good idea if they dieted, against two-thirds of overweight women. (Thinking, of course, != doing.)

But here's the scary part: Gallup says that even if we all reached that ideal weight, fully 37 percent of us would still be overweight and fully 4 percent would be obese.

Here is your fiber-pimping link for the week. The fact that, even though I am eating more calories and processed carbs than I have in a year, and exercising less than I have in a year, I'm still not bloating up like a pufferfish (so far) may have something to do with the fact that, all that notwithstanding, I'm still getting a goodly amount of fiber. I like Granny Smith apples a lot, and eat a couple every day. That's 10 grams of fiber right there, plus a slice or two of whole wheat bread, a couple handfuls of nuts and (too few) other veggie/fruits.

From the Department of You Probably Already Figured This Out: "Beer bellies" aren't really caused by beer.

The bottom line: If you're putting on weight around the middle, chances are you can't blame it on just beer. The real culprits may be the fatty or very high-calorie foods that go so well with a brew. Go easy on the chips, sugar-coated beer nuts, and pizza. If you can control the urge to snack, you're likely to find you can enjoy a beer or two a day without having to loosen your belt.

Me, I don't drink beer. (I'm a teatotaller actually. Much cheaper to eat out that way.) But this story is presented as a public service.

In other fitness blogs: Bruce Baugh and his mom are planning an Atkins-friendly Christmas dinner. With any luck he'll share the menu details in time for next week's report. He reports that his weight loss is "stalled," but I consider "stalled" in the run-up to Christmas to be a victory.

In other other fitness blogs: Nothin'. Looks like some other people have either shut down their regimens or stopped writing about it. Can I take a hint? Hell, no! See you next week.