Mr. Language Person - At Obsidian Wings, von reminds readers of his campaign to stomp out the idiot phrase "homicide bomber," linguistic vice of Fox News, the White House and the dimmer sorts of warbloggers. While researching what will probably be my last American Spectator article this week, I learned that the substitution is even stupider and more counterproductive than von imagines. The very reason that groups like Hamas refer to suicide bombers as shahids ("martyrs") is to distract from the fact that the bombers killed themselves. Suicide is a sin to Muslims. We ought to not just insist on calling them "suicide bombers," we ought to italicise the "suicide" part - ought to chant it over and over again like Wonkette and "ass fucking". We ought to rub their noses in it.

Even rhetorically, national defense is too important to leave to hawks. They can't even get that right.

A Billion Here, A Billion There - President GW Bush , who has not vetoed a single bill in his first term so far, has increased spending faster than any president since the Richard Nixon-Gerald Ford two-step of the mid-seventies, according to a handy chart from the Independence Institute. That's total spending OR non-defense discretionary spending. Both categories' growth has outpaced growth under Democrat Jimmy Carter and heftily exceeds the spending growth rates of Democrat Bill Clinton and Republican GHW Bush.

As the Institute press release notes

In response, likely Democratic Party challenger John Kerry has maligned alleged spending cuts and called for even higher taxes and spending. The consequence is that we now have two parties competing to see which can grow government profligacy faster.

There is a solution, though: divided government.

Gaudy Night, the Continuing Series - "Genetic mutation turns tot into superboy."

Funtime's Over - One reason why there's been so little comics blogging here lately is because comics have become somewhat depressing. While I notoriously let loose a pro-superhero story meme, at no point have I denied that superhero stories can be bad, indeed, systematically bad. The blatant winding down of "NuMarvel," as talented or interestingly flawed creators put their toys back in the original packaging, has been a downer to experience. I can see it happening in practically every book I've enjoyed. In the case of Mark Waid and Mike Weiringo's Fantastic Four and Grant Morrison's New X-Men, the authors made a metafictional show of it, and those stories gained for the bittersweet resonances. Waid makes Jack Kirby the God of the Marvel Universe, but Waid, and every reader old enough to appreciate what Jack Kirby meant to Marvel, knows how the company treated him and can intuit what Waid is confessing as his recent auctorial handiwork gets literally erased. It's actually a hell of a story. Since then: whatever. Morrison's last New X-Men storyline is less obviously audacious, but by making the whole alternate future arc the subjunctive musings of the Phoenix, Morrison reminds us how the cosmology of corporate comics has deus ex machina built into it. (The machine from which the god steps when summoned runs Microsoft Excel and Oracle Financials.)

Bendis and Maleev's Daredevil counts as especially disappointing. While I disagree with his critics about the virtues of Bendis' dialogue, the recently concluded "King of Hell's Kitchen" arc can only be said to represent a failure of nerve. It's perfectly true that Bendis obfuscates just how Matt Murdock's decision to become "the new Kingpin" differed from what he had always done as a crimefighter anyway. The story is maddeningly vague on what compromises the new course entailed. Worse, it drags in psychology as a tool to tidy up the title's variance from standard. A fatal mistake since superhero stories will bear all the character you want to freight them with but cannot support psychology even a little bit. Beyond that, it's undignified and even pitiable: according to "King," everything that has happened in Daredevil since, in the real world, Bendis took it over, all the monumental decisions, the tribulations and their vanquishings, every hard choice and final resolution Matt Murdock made over the last four years of stories, is nothing but a symptom of the character's mental illness. That Bendis would put this retroactive construction on his own work dismays.

Elsewhere, Robert Morales, who may well have figured out how to write Captain America given time, sweeps off the stage the new girlfriend who was one of the title's chief lively elements, purely so the next writer won't have to deal with writing her out of the action himself. Bruce Jones' Hulk shows less "reset effect" so far. Aspects of the current Iron Man arc are enjoyable, but he's swapped strong if oversexed female supporting characters for negligible oversexed female supporting characters; and while we've all figured out by now that "the leader" of Home Base is The Leader, it would be nice if he'd come out and say this at some point.

Ironically, the bright spot on my Marvel pull list is the much-suspected Whedon-Cassaday Astonishing X-Men. This despite the awful new costumes (especially Cyclops' frogman suit). The dialogue is inconsistent, but the characters are strong and Whedon is actually pulling something of a magic act here: he plays up putting Grant Morrison's toys back in the box (look! costumes! superheroics!), but it's one of those trick boxes like magicians use. When he opens it back up, they won't be there at all. The plot thread about the doctor who claims to have found a "cure" for the mutant gene strikes me as eminently in the spirit of Morrison's New X-Men run. I'm no longer just willing to give this title a try, I'm hooked.

So, overall, a trough. Corporate comics will give you efflorescences of glory. But sooner or later every Marvel or DC Renaissance ends. It's time to pour out a 40 on the grave of NuMarvel, but there's no point in being bitter. We simply save our dollars and hope to catch the next wave.

A Fanboy's Quotes come from Neilalien:

So, are superhero readers arrested adolescents who fantasize about wielding power, or do they desire to submit to power? - It's not that the snob camp can't make up its mind between the two - it's that the snob camp will embrace any and all theories that pee in their straw man's Cheerios.

Oh, I said quotes, plural. So add

So where is your Fascist Line To Cross on that continuum? And where do you put different comic books on that continuum and in relation to where your Line is? What makes an action fascist? How do you define fascism? See what fun interesting discussions happen when you start examining superhero comic book literature seriously? Maybe capes aren't fascist, they're just well-suited for discussing fascism.

That's enough quoting. But there's plenty more great stuff in the same item.

Original Sin - I was corresponding with Diana Moon the other week about how the real problem in American politics is less The Neocons than "national greatness conservatism." It's an interesting question whether there's a one-to-one relationship between neoconservatives and national greatness adherants. Are there any neocons who would abjure the central precepts of "national greatness?" I'm pretty sure there are national greatness conservatives who don't properly qualify as neocons - Exhibit A being Vice President Dick Cheney.

Anyway, Gene Healy has dug up an apposite quote from Weekly Standard editor Fred Barnes. It dates from 1997:

It was exciting to follow and write about ... Every press conference, I watched. Desert Storm was all I thought about or talked about. My stories concentrated on President Bush's heroic role in the war. As best I recall, he wasn't in a funk, not even for a single fleeting moment.

The Republican Party has been taken over by people who, like Barnes, consider war a tonic for the national soul. For them the atrocities of September 11, 2001, were not just a calamity. They were an opportunity. They are not to be trusted with the nation's defense because they are not trying to defend it. They're trying to purge the place.

Grrr! - Public Service Savings Days at Borders! Ironically, my libertarian principles require that I affirm their right to hold such a sale if they choose! Aaaaaaaaaaaugh! Borders - is - lying! But - if they are - lying - then they are - telling the truth! But if - !

Beats the Hell Out of Halliburton Day - Buffalo, NY celebrates the fortieth anniversary of the spicy chicken wing. And they're sending the "wing king" on

a four-city tour to promote the festival, and the rest of the region's assets.

"We're going to use this great icon to promote Buffalo tourism," Geiger said, as dozens lined up for free wings in the city's Niagara Square.

[ . . . ]

The wing tour includes stops in Pittsburgh and Erie, Pa., and Cleveland and Columbus, Ohio.

I suppose that, Pittsburgh excepted, Buffalo could look like an "up" destination from the perspective of those tour stops.

Waitaminute, free wings? I am so there.

My Life and Roleplaying - New 20' x 20' Room contributor Vincent Baker has the coolest "How I got into roleplaying games" story I have ever seen or expect to see.

This is Sports Center with Unqualified Offerings - So Good triumphed over Evil in the NBA Finals, but I noticed one aspect of that triumph that's worth printing.

I have a neighbor who works for the Journal and is pretty plugged in. He tells me that when rebounding machine Ben Wallace was with the Washington Wizards, he used to have a buddy, after practices, just throw the ball off the backboard so he could study how it bounced and practice chasing it. This is why, as my neighbor points out, it was stupid of the Wizards to get rid of Ben Wallace.

Sorry, I had to take a sob break there. Anyway, cut to Game 5 of the Finals and what I realized. You know that first foul shot of two that's dead whether it goes in or misses? In most games, the miss hits the floor and maybe someone sticks a hand out and gets it after a bounce or two, or maybe the ref gets it. And you know how the Lakers, especially Shaq, kept missing foul shots? Ben Wallace went and got every one of those balls. In the air. No matter how far up the lane it bounced or how far toward the opposite side of the aisle, Ben Wallace hopped out there and grabbed it. Not showy. Very businesslike, but he got them all and got them before they hit the ground.

I daresay this has something to do with why he got 22 rebounds in earnest that night, and something to do with why the Pistards scattered the Lakers like a bunch of old marbles.

Anonymous Admirer - Let's face it. I'm temperamentally inclined to like anyone who writes a book called Imperial Hubris and calls Woodrow Wilson a "bloody-handed fantasist." He certainly does sound apocalyptic, though, as quoted by Spencer Ackerman. All that stuff about how

Killing in large numbers is not enough to defeat our Muslim foes. With killing must come a Sherman-like razing of infrastructure. Roads and irrigation systems; bridges, power plants, and crops in the field; fertilizer plants and grain mills--all these and more will need to be destroyed to deny the enemy its support base. ... [S]uch actions will yield large civilian casualties, displaced populations, and refugee flows.

is not peacenik talk. Still, I wonder if the quotations, generous as they are, are completely in context. Our Author concludes the passage above with

Again, this sort of bloody-mindedness is neither admirable nor desirable, but it will remain America's only option so long as she stands by her failed policies toward the Muslim world.

Which suggests that the "Jacksonian" Sherman-style march through the Muslim Middle East is Anon's idea of the dire alternative to reconfiguring our policies. Puzzling out the excerpts, which is all I've got so far, and the interview with Spencer Ackerman linked above and Kevin Drum's e-mail interview with Ackerman, I get the impression that, if Anonymous sounds bloody-minded, it's because he's so pessimistic about the country's ability and willingness to change its policies. (Viz. Tacitus, who wants to lash the US to an Israeli-Kurdish mast and ride things out. His wry conclusion that riding things out "seems to be our core plan anyway" is hard to gainsay.) Anon's plans boil down to "reconsider" the nature of the US relationship to Israel and do something about our dependence on foreign oil. The latter is simply nowhere so easy technologically or economically as people like to pretend. The former would involve getting people like John McCain and Andrew Sullivan to realize that Israel is a whole separate country and not part of the United States, and it's considered impolite to bring that up.

So, he's gloomy. And that creeps out Matthew Yglesias. I think we need to separate Anonymous the analyst of our Road to Today from Anonymous the Advisor on our Road from Here. The latter writes "America is in a war for survival. Not survival in terms of protecting territory, but in terms of keeping the ability to live as we want, not as we must...." I still wonder about that. I put some credence in the Healy Theory:

My suspicion is that there really aren't a whole lot of Islamic radicals in-country who want to kill themselves to kill Americans. No other explanation fits the available data anywhere near as well.

This doesn't mean there's no danger, by any means. Islamist terrorists remain a threat to kill small, medium or even large numbers of Americans if they can find further "multipliers" like the exploding jet fuel times molten steel times gravity formula of not quite three years ago. And some group of them may obtain a real WMD - a nuke or subclass of weaponized germs - likely via the still-insecure ex-Soviet arsenal. It's stupid, as Gene says, to pursue policies that increase the number of Muslims who want to devote their lives to doing us harm or winking at those who want to do us harm. That kind of thing takes brainpower, so don't maximize the number of brains devoted to it.

But for the time being, I remain more in Gene's camp than Anonymous' when it comes to the scope of the threat we face. And I understand why Matt worries about Anon's bloody-mindedness. Diana Moon has been concerned for some time that some hawks are establishing an exterminationist rhetoric. As quoted, Anonymous' prescriptions could serve that program.

War is Harmful to . . . PROFITS and Other Living Things per the USA Today. Some of it you can chalk up to excuse-making, but not all.

TTFN - Father's Day'd out. Tomorrow we'll have some stuff about some stuff, including the NBA Finals and the nature of poetry. I'm working on another article too, so duty calls.

As a reminder, fitness blogging appears damned regularly on my LiveJournal. Actually, very little BUT fitness blogging appears on my LiveJournal. This week, equivocal praise for KFC's roast chicken strips meal, shilling for AquaJogger flotation belts and a Maryland running store testimonial. If you keep wondering, How is Jim's marathon training program coming anyway? it's where you find out.