Back and Forth - Brendan O'Neill says the problem with Iraq is not just the drive to war but the assumption that the West should intervene at all. Steve Chapman asks if Brendan really means it. Brendan says, Yeah, I really do.

Unqualified Offerings is with Brendan O'Neill on this one. It has been on record as favoring deterrence against Iraq because deterrence has worked. We kept Iraq from using weapons of you-know-what in Gulf War I by making it clear to Saddam that we would nuke his ass if he tried anything. Part and parcel of going to deterrence is ending sanctions and likely the UNSCOM inspections regime too (though not the IAEA one), plus "covert operations aimed at regime change" or whatever you want to call the coup and assassination plots the government has been pursuing with varying degrees of enthusiasm for the last decade.

Probably worse than outright conquering Iraq would be to continue the facsimile of a policy the US and Britain have had since 1991, which is the foreign affairs equivalent of bear-baiting. Unqualified Offerings thinks war with Iraq is a very bad idea. But continually poking a stick at a caged animal is a worse one.

(Note: The IAEA inspections regime is part of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, not the 1991 cease-fire agreement. IAEA was allowed to make a limited tour this year.)

The Poindexter Beat - Reader Munham Yam wonders if Unqualified Offerings had it quite right in its item below about John Poindexter returning to save us all! (See "Annals of Upward Failure" below.) Poindexter has been appointed the head of DARPA's Information Awareness Office, which has both a mission and a vision. Mission:

imagine, develop, apply, integrate, demonstrate and transition information technologies, components and prototype, closed-loop, information systems that will counter asymmetric threats by achieving total information awareness useful for preemption; national security warning; and national security decision making.

This worries UO: there is no indication that synergies will be realized. But at least Poindexter proved himself adept at the imagining part in his last job - e.g. imagining that it was a good idea to sell arms to Iran; imagining that there were moderates in Iran in the mid-1980s; imagining that the likes of Richard Secord and Manucher Gorbanifar were the sorts of folks you wanted to trust the nation's security to, imagining that he and Ollie North and Bud McFarlane were wiser and braver than their decadent subjects.

Now to the vision:

The most serious asymmetric threat facing the United States is terrorism, a threat characterized by collections of people loosely organized in shadowy networks that are difficult to identify and define. IAO plans to develop technology that will allow understanding of the intent of these networks, their plans, and potentially define opportunities for disrupting or eliminating the threats. To effectively and efficiently carry this out, we must promote sharing, collaborating and reasoning to convert nebulous data to knowledge and actionable options. IAO will accomplish this by pursuing the development of technologies, components, and applications to produce a proto-type system.

How will IAO defeat terror? UO highlights its favorites, the surefire terror-beaters:

o Collaboration and sharing over TCP/IP networks across agency boundaries
o Large, distributed repositories with dynamic schemas that can be changed interactively by users
o Foreign language machine translation and speech recognition
o Biometric signatures of humans
o Real time learning, pattern matching and anomalous pattern detection
o Entity extraction from natural language text
o Human network analysis and behavior model building engines
o Event prediction and capability development model building engines
o Structured argumentation and evidential reasoning
o Story telling, change detection, and truth maintenance
o Business rules sub-systems for access control and process management
o Biologically inspired algorithms for agent control
o Other aids for human cognition and human reasoning

Unqualified Offerings volunteers to help with the storytelling.

Hard work! ("It is difficult to counter the threat that terrorists pose.") Now, it's not necessarily all bunkum, but much of it reads as if the federal government were an alienated California suburbanite and IAO were Werner Erhard. What does this have to do with John Poindexter? The leftie-oriented hereinreality.com notes that Poindexter was a VP of Syntek Technologies, which worked with DARPA on Genoa, "kind of a military-grade Google/Napster for use in instant analysis of electronic data."

'Taint no big thing: just another spin of the famous revolving door. Anyway, while Poindexter's position is not in the (yet-unborn) Homeland Security Department, his office does seem to claim that it will defend the country. (Belay Libertarian Rant 364: Shouldn't protecting the US be the job of the Defense Department?)

Munham Yam, by the way, is a man after UO's own heart:

Even though I'm a right-wing nut, Ledeen scares me. I actually think he and Frank Gaffney are the same guy.

Jim Henley, 10:50 PM

Department of Corrections - Michael Croft of Ones and Zeros fact-checks the ass of Unqualified Offerings about just what he does during recording sessions, and concludes his e-mail with a popular army joke. Unqualified Offerings reproduces the entire text below. (Cliffs Notes: "I'm an engineer, not a producer.")

There are two important people in the control room of any recording studio, in addition to any number of friends, fellow band members, hangers on, significant others, insignificant others, interns, parents, wannabes and financiers. There is an engineer and a producer. Yes, sometimes there is only one person, but there are two hats.

The engineer is responsible for the technical side of the recording: setting up microphones and Direct Inputs and spit guards and such. Getting the recording and doing the punch ins and outs and making rough mixes and archiving the work tapes.

The producer is the person who listens to a recording that isn't coming together, screws up his (or her) face and says "Glockenspiel!"

There is much bleed. Producers are often heavily involved in the technical side of mixing the product. They may pick up an instrument and play the three note guitar highlight just the way they want it. And when the producer isn't sure if the take is going to work, checking the engineer's reaction is frequently the difference between pressing "talkback" and saying "Great, we got it! Take 5 while we reset for the next one!" and "that was really good, but let's see if we can get a better one."

Sometimes the engineer has to do some producing if the project doesn't really have anyone attached who can do it.

I have never actually produced on anything that was released. As a friend of mine who was asked if he was an officer during his time in the military once said "no, I worked for a living."

Another Day, Another Pot-Kettle Item - In a column debunking some internet legends, professionally-folksy Washington Post columnist Bob Levey informs us that

Young people think that anything on the Internet must be true. Oldsters know better. The Internet is a veritable bog of fish stories, larger than life -- and very often devoid of truth.

Levey offers no evidence that all or even most young people believe what they read on the internet, or even that all or most of the people who believe internet legends are young. All he does is note that there are some stories going around the internet that aren't true. But he must be right, or the Washington Post wouldn't print it. So just accept the truth: young people believe whatever they read on the internet; old people believe Ed McMahon is an insurance analyst.

Icthyoterror: The Latest - Reader/Gaming Buddy Bill Dowling and Gamer/Reading Buddy Mike "Epoch" Sullivan brought the latest northern snakehead analysis to UO's attention yesterday.

Mike has a gaming-oriented blog, which he'll let you read.

A Fangirl's Notes - Meryl Yourish plays Would-You-Rather with her favorite superheroes. Batman, Wolverine, Elongated Man, Wolverine and Mr. Fantastic um, come up big.

Matt Welch: Labor-Saving Device - Andrew Sullivan wrote some really dumbass stuff this morning about "determined and organized" opposition to war with Iraq. (UO only wishes. The extent of any "organization" it can claim is exchanging a couple of e-mails a month with Justin Raimondo, with about half the correspondence consisting of one of us explaining how wrong the other is about something.)

Happily, Matt Welch dismantled Sullivan before UO got around to it, which a) leaves time for other things; and b) keeps this site from writing when it is spitting mad.

(Note: Not content to let Matt Welch have all the fun, Micah Holmquist has a go too.)

Last Ditch Defense - Adjunct fellow Kevin Maroney e-mails about this morning's item on Clash songs in commercials:

Before you neener too neenerly, you should ask yourself if Strummer and Jones control their songs enough to have any say in whether they get sold to commercials. They probably do, but it's far from a certain thing.

This is at least possible. Unqualified Offerings put in some time this evening doing Google searches for possible statements by Strummer or Jones about their art being prostituted against their will. Can't find any, though Donald Rumsfeld would want to point out that that doesn't mean there isn't any. If any loyal reader can offer a definitive settlement of the issue, they will receive a public expression of gratitude - and get to see a snarky weblogger eat crow on his own site.

That's a quasi-contest. Here's another: Which Rage Against the Machine song will be the first one used in a commercial, and for what product?

Speaking of Rage Against the Machine, does this happen to anyone else? Whenever a certain passage in "Sleep Now in the Fire" plays, UO finds a compulsion to complete it as follows:

I am the Nina
the Pinta
the Santa
Maria
and just when
it hit them
somebody turned around and shouted

Play that funky music, White Boy!

Your Official Unfortunate Headline of the Day: "Celine Dion Developing Fragrance."

(From AP via the Washington Post.)

Death or Glory - "I believe in this and it's been tested by research," the Clash once sang, "he who fucks nuns will later join the church."

In my youth, the Clash were uncompromising radicals, who made propulsive leftist punk rock, and their biggest fans loved them as much for their politics as for their backbeat and reggae rhythms. A libertarian can unequivocally love "Julie's in the Drug Squad," and "Safe European Home," about a visit to the real Jamaica, shows a lot more self-awareness than a lot of political rock. But the anti-capitalism was forthright and undeniable.

So now rockers of Unqualified Offerings' generation (or half-generation if you prefer) are old enough that they are facing the same temptations to compromise with The Man that the boomer rockers faced. And the Clash, of all people, have sold not one but two songs to commercials. "Should I Stay or Should I Go" is the theme song for Stolichniya's Citrona commercials. Well, that song was already half a commercial compromise. But now comes word from a mailing list I'm on that "London Calling" is being used in - get this - Jaguar ads!

Unlike "Stay," "London Calling" was an uncompromising political tune, the apocalyptic opening track to an apocalyptic political album. Whether you agreed with its message or not, it represented devotion to a a fiercely-held ideal. Seeing this clarion anthem and touchstone of my youth turned to the basest commercial uses - well, what can even a flinty arch-capitalist like Unqualified Offerings say, except

Neener Neener Neener!

We Have People for That - Istanblog "cheerfully" notes that when it comes to suppressing the Kurds, our allies the Turks have the experience and the interest both:

Ideally they would make sure that the Kurds feel that being a part of the new Iraq would be better for them than being independent. This would mean convincing the Kurds that the new Iraq would give them a full voice in government, encourage their unique culture, and give them the opportunity to develop economically. Unfortunately the Turkish government, and especially its military, has never demonstrated this philosophy towards separatists, instead believing that bombing the hell out of villages is a better way to keep them in the fold.

Unqualified Offerings could swear that approach sounds like someone else we know.

Oh Really? - On Samizdata, Perry de Havilland dismantles a much-praised piece by the much-praised Victor Davis Hanson:

Ah yes, I frequently hear 'European' taxi cab drivers, nurses, office workers and house painters bemoan those tasteless Americans whilst listening to Beethoven on the radio and discoursing on Sartre with each other... oh pleeeease. I don't know who Victor Davis Hanson hung out with on his trip to 'Europe' (I guess 'Europe' is all just a homogenous mass to a Mexican Canadian Yank like Hanson) but mass culture in western Europe is pretty much overrun with Winnebagos, jet skis, and Play Station IIs... and ghastly low brow Euro pop music, tabloid newspapers, celebrations of half-wittedness like 'Big Brother' on television and other such manifestations of lower and middle class 'cultural empowerment'. The reality of what common people in 'Europe' think about the United States is that for the most part they don't really think about it much at all. The USA does not loom as large in the popular psyche as Hanson thinks.

It sure is great to have Perry back actively blogging again.

Samizdata also has a good, long piece by Christopher Pellerito about Big Media's "Don't Know, Don't Care" policy on financial reporting. An excerpt:

MSNBC wonders out loud whether it is possible to "time" the market -- that is, can investors count on making extra money in the stock market by picking the optimal times to buy and sell? This is hardly a controversial issue in the finance community -- the weakest version of the Efficient Market Hypothesis (EMH) says that you cannot forecast stock prices by extrapolating present trends or by overlaying historical cycles -- that "market timing" is fool's gold. Yet in an attempt to make the story "balanced," MSNBC gives disproportionate weight to the crankish opinions of a "stock cycle" fetishist named Peter Eliades. The author of the story is totally unable to critically assess Eliades' claims.

Never mind that stock cycle theory is the phrenology of the finance world -- Peter Eliades is telling us that he can make money timing stocks. His "proof": stock prices fluctuate, so it is critical to buy and sell at the right times. Gee, you mean I would make more money if I bought at a lower price and sold at a higher one? That is a tautology, not an argument; it is not proof that any valid strategy for forecasting the peaks and valleys of the market can be devised. The MSNBC author seems totally incapable of making this critical distinction.

Lots more.

Annals of Upward Failure - Unqualified Offerings missed the news that President Bush appointed Iran-Contra alum John Poindexter to an important scare-quote homeland scare-quote security position at the end of February. (The press conference exchange on the appointment is priceless.)

With Poindexter on the inside and Michael Ledeen on the outside cheering things along, Unqualified Offerings feels secure indeed. There was even a Robert McFarlane sighting last fall.

Is this all supposed to end with Manucher Ghorbanifar on the Peacock Throne?

Swag: Two Views - Tres Producer-third Eric Olsen came up with an intriguing idea - get bloggers to sign up to review music, therefore becoming eligible for (oh yes!) free CDs! Michael Croft of Ones and Zeroes, a producer himself, explains why his conscience says no.

There's Good and Bad in Everyone Dept. - Patrick Nielsen Hayden has finally returned to Electrolite. Yay! Patrick Nielsen Hayden praises a Hendrick Hertzberg review of a book on the Constitution by Robert Dahl. Eh. Glenn Reynolds weighs in, arguing that both Hertzberg and Dahl are criticizing the Constitution for not being democratic enough, but that the framers weren't trying to produce a democracy, but a republic. Reynolds:

Since World War II the United States has made a big deal about democracy, as opposed to democratic republicanism, because it was simpler to explain, and hence an easier idea to sell than separation of powers, checks and balances, etc., etc. Interestingly, Americans have been more swayed by that propaganda than anyone else, and the importance of the Constitution's built-in countermajoritarianism has been largely ignored -- except where issues like school prayer or flag-burning come up.

But there's a lot more to the Constitution's countermajoritarianism than the Bill of Rights, and there's good reason to believe that the structural protections against tyranny have done more to protect freedom than the Bill of Rights -- which the Supreme Court didn't really do much with until the mid-20th Century anyway.

In response, Patrick writes

...but it seems to me that Hertzberg isn't calling for a reformist uprising against (for instance) the current arrangements for the election of Senators, so much as he's observing that--like any product of compromise and logrolling--the Constitution has its strengths and weaknesses and we'd delude ourselves less about contemporary politics if we could avoid the mental model in which the impossibly-wise framers gifted us with a system of near-perfection, which later and lesser men and women have brought to ruin.

But on the evidence of the parts Patrick quotes, it looks like Hertzberg and Dahl are finding the Constitution's "weaknesses" precisely in those areas where it is least "democratic." Which makes it a partisan critique in nonpartisan guise.

In other words, Advantage: Instapundit!

Your Tax Dollars at Work - From the Associated Press:

An Egyptian American academic was convicted a second time today of tarnishing Egypt's image and other charges and was sentenced to seven years' imprisonment in a case international human rights groups have condemned as politically motivated.

Egypt gets two billion dollars a year in US aid. You say you don't like Arab tyranny? Stop paying for it. Pull the troops that are "defending" the Saudis out of Arabia. Give them the same fine intelligence cooperation against their enemies that they've given us. See how long they last. You think the Iranian government is becoming too dangerous to Israel, what with all its support for Hezbollah and investment in long-range weapons? They can do that, because you're paying to neutralize their rival next door, Iraq.

Some pundits talk as if there are no intermediate steps available between propping these vicious regimes up and toppling them by force. That would be what we call an imperialist mindset. It's not necessarily evil, but Unqualified Offerings does think it's tragically misguided.

An Exercise for the Reader - Diane E. of Letter from Gotham has a long, important piece today that is the best summation of a first-principles, pro-Israel perspective on the assassination of Hamas leader Sheikh Shehadeh that Unqualified Offerings has seen. UO doesn't agree with all of it. (Diana makes much of the fact that most Palestinians and Arabs celebrate their atrocities while most Israelis wring hands and gnash teeth over their own. This used to impress UO. Lately however, it puts this site in mind of "The Walrus and the Carpenter.") But she makes an eloquent case in sober fashion, and it deserves attention.

The Odds Always Favor the (Ice) House - Interesting, skeptical consideration of the likelihood of cryonic resurrection actually working, by former unofficial substitute Unqualified Offerings Chad Orzcel of Uncertain Principles. Just an excerpt:

By opting to be frozen, you're betting your life on the propositions that:

1. Future medical technology will be able to cure what's killing you,

2. Future medical technology will be able to freeze and revive human beings,

3. Future medical technology will be able to repair any damage done in today's imperfect freezing processes, and

4. Someone in the future will actually care enough to bother thawing you out.

These are all dubious propositions.

There's much more, and he includes links to some other recent ruminations on the topic.

Annals of Post-Constitutional History - According to John Diamond of The USA Today,

An intensive effort by U.S. intelligence to establish a link between al-Qaeda and Iraq is being driven, in part, by a conclusion reached in recent weeks by White House and Pentagon legal and legislative advisers. They believe that connecting Iraq and the Sept. 11 attacks would allow the administration to avoid debates at the United Nations and in Congress over what some would call an unprovoked strike.

This is interesting. If the evidence exists, why try to avoid the debate? (In Congress - forget the UN.) Why not stride boldly into the Chamber, brandish the evidence and demand that Congress declare war on the malefactor (Iraq)? What could be better than to lay out a strong case that Iraq was behind the massacres of last September, secure the assent of the people's representatives and take a united country into battle against the foe?

The answer: nothing could be better. Which makes it striking that the administration wants to avoid doing so. It also makes it clear that the administration is naive. Because whatever evidence it manages to come up with will itself be the subject of the debate, and if the administration tries to duck the discussion it will have the dignity of those electoral candidates that get replaced by empty chairs when they refuse to show for candidates' night.

Diamond's article doesn't contain event the slightest hint that the administration is actually close to acquiring evidence of Iraqi involvement in the September massacres. It's pretty obvious to Unqualified Offerings why that is: there isn't any. But they could, in principle, surprise us. If they do, they should have the guts to act constitutionally.

Senate Foreign Relations Chairman Joseph Biden, D-Del., said top White House officials have asked him repeatedly what congressional authorization, if any, the administration would require.

What do they need to ask Biden for? Don't they have internet connections in the White House? There's an instruction manual for this kind of thing. Even after Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt still sought a formal declaration of war. (Give him that much, my isolationist confreres!)

Even if you favor war with Iraq, it should bother you the way this government wants to go about it.

The Love That Really REALLY Shouldn't Have Spoken Its Name - As many people know K/S or "slash" is an underground genre of fan fiction that allows Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock of Star Trek to - fulfill the prime directive as it were.

Now it turns out there is a whole new K/S genre, according to this AP story:

A Russian writer under investigation for disseminating pornography in a novel that depicts sexual contact between Soviet leaders Joseph Stalin and Nikita Khrushchev refused to answer police questions.

"I refused to give evidence because I consider this matter absurd, vicious and humiliating to me as a writer and humiliating to Russian literature as a whole," Vladimir Sorokin told reporters outside the Moscow police's main investigative department, where he was summoned.

Police began investigating Sorokin after prosecutors deemed pornographic parts of his 1999 novel "Goluboye Salo," which can be translated as "Blue Lard" or "Gay Lard." The book came to the attention of prosecutors after the youth group Walking Together filed a criminal complaint accusing Sorokin of disseminating pornography.

Good on the writer for refusing to knuckle under, and bad on the Sovi - excuse Unqualified Offerings! Russia for hassling him.

Still and all, Unqualified Offerings has to say that this story has occasioned the most upsetting unbidden images of sexual congress since the time, years ago, that UO learned that Martha Stewart and John McLaughlin were dating.

It's a Small World After All - This is just too cool somehow. AH Amin writes to describe himself as follows:

Ex Tank Corps Officer , Major ,Pakistan Army , Author :-- Pakistan Army Till 1965, Sepoy Rebellion Of 1857-59, Mans Role In History, Ex Executive Editor Monthly Globe Karachi, Ex Assistant Editor Defence Journal Karachi, Member Orbat.Com, Columnist Pravda, Nation Etc.

Free Lance Journalist And Author

What does this have to do with Unqualified Offerings? Way back on November 11 this site blogged a piece from Pakistan's International News with the then-controversial title "The Myth of Afghan Invincibility," by "AH Amin." About the author, Unqualified Offerings wrote "(No, I have no idea who AH Amin is.)" But UO admired the puckishness of

Now we come to the romantic tales of Afghan invincibility in the British period. The British are in the habit of dramatising the odds they faced and giving it a poetic touch.

Alas, the original link to the article is dead.

On an "It's all about me, note," the e-mail shows that Rebecca Blood was right when she counsels in The Weblog Handbook that one should never put something in one's blog that you wouldn't want someone to see down the line.

Negative Capability Is Your Friend - Matt Welch thinks Unqualified Offerings is wrong about the appeal and achievement of Glenn Reynolds:

If Reynolds was really concerned with “nurtur[ing] a cadre of libertarian-flavored center-right supporters of an expansive war,” then A) he wouldn’t have perma-links to Henley, Yglesias, Alterman or me, and B) he wouldn’t get all that lusted-after traffic. Glenn’s ideological promiscuity is actually a key to his popularity. His taste in blogs, and their relationship to his personal politics, is not un-analogous to Michael Kelly’s editorship of the Atlantic: quality trumps positioning on the political spectrum. Henley and Yglesias are dreaming of a partisan non-partisan.

Welch is a smart man, a kind man and right about an awful lot.

Now, my post about liberal bloggers and the possibility of a left-wing Instapundit had a couple of purposes:

1) Note one of Reynolds' great virtues, his willingness to lift less popular bloggers up rather than tread them under.

2) Twit the folks I guessed were the most popular liberal bloggers for having less - ALERT: Liberal totem word coming! - generosity than a "self-centered" (because he's a) rightie.

I'm okay with Matt's "partisan non-partisan" concept. Perhaps unlike Matt, I think it's less an oxymoron than a paradox, and paradoxes are real things. If we think of Glenn Reynolds as a "partisan-nonpartisan rightie (for lack of a better term) then I said the left lacks a "partisan-nonpartisan" promiscuously-linking blog star. (Note: I accept Reynolds' self-description as a whig rather than a conservative.)

It's worth noting that Ginger Stampley suggested that by making this claim I was insulting Matt Welch and Ken Layne! In my defense, I should note that at the time I put up the original post, both Matt and Ken Layne were coming off hiatuses. It was not clear that Matt's eruption into activity over Steve Earle was going to persist. It's also, he said as delicately as possible, not clear that their traffic approaches the levels of Josh Marshall or Eric Alterman, or Reynolds. (I'm pretty sure that when it comes to traffic, there's Instapundit, and then there's not exactly.)

Where am I going with all of this? Actually, I've just realized I have no freaking idea! (Q: Does this admission count as "Trustworthy Blogging?") Patrick Nielsen Hayden, in Matt's comments section, gets my argument about right.

Ignorance is Bliss - Hot Buttered Death thinks he wants to know what Lee Greenwood did to deserve UO's recent, um, fisking? But he's wrong. Very very very very wrong.

Hot Buttered Death looks like a great blog if you want great links and pithy commentary - as opposed to what you get here. (Unqualified Offerings should probably have called itself PAGE DOWN...) Here's a sample. There are lots more where these came from:

Father of 21 kids wants more, mother not so convinced.

How elderly people can think themselves to death.

Dutch police hunt serial defecator.

That's enough. Go to Hot Buttered Death and get the rest yourself.

Art of the Possible - Anglo-Texan Nigel E. Richardson says "NO ONE HAS A MORE ENGLISH NAME THAN I! NO ONE I TELL YOU!!!!"

Wait! That's not what he says! He says

Political blogs are starting to bore me now...

and kindly cites UO's appreciation of League of Extraordinary Gentlemen II as the sort of thing he'd rather read.

Man, Unqualified Offerings can relate. It's just that there's these wars. (Nigel also agrees with UO and "OC" and others that the term "anti-idiotarian" has jumped the shark. Go Nigel!)

Nigel's blog has some good stuff about his move to Texas. Check out his item on visiting San Antonio. (UO should say that what most struck it about the Alamo were the ironic "Please. No Concealed Weapons on the Premises" signs.)

And if you too are sick of political blogs, check out the Illuminated Donkey's recent series, Skeeball Week! Start here and scroll up.

Mirror, Mirror - Reader/Gaming Buddy Bill Dowling points out that the main League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Volume II annotation site linked below is Geocities and thus prone to bandwidth-limit outages. Bill notes that the mirror site, not on Geocities, might be a better bet.

Rimshot Alert

An article in yesterday's Washington Post points out once again that abstinence-only sex education leaves much to be desired...

Avedon Carol, ladies and gentlemen. She'll be here all week.

Nine (Thousand) Princes in Araby - Speaking of The Talking Dog, UO believes your TD was the first to note the odd pattern of sudden morbidity among the younger heirs to the Saudi throne and suggest that something strange might be going on:

Meanwhile, note that the Saudi Prince owner of the Kentucky Derby winning horse died of a "heart attack" at 46; his brother (another Saudi Prince) kicked off of a "heart attack" at 49 a few months ago; and yet another Saudi Prince, their cousin, died at 41 in a car accident on the way to the funeral. Could we be watching the Saudi version of a succession struggle, as three nephews of King Faud, all in their 40's, die more or less simultaneously? Or maybe they just all got a batch of bad hummus. Stay tuned...

Tipped off by TD, The Guardian has begun to look into the issue.

Big Tent - Naturally, The Talking Dog has a resolution to the War of Kurdish Suppression problem, vouchsafed to Unqualified Offerings in the following exclusive e-mail:

Actually, as troubling as your post on this issue is, and as rightly
concerned we should be with pissing off our long-time NATO allies in Ankara,
there is, as always, a creative solution to this troubling dilemma, and
without provoking a wider regional war than the attack on Saddam will already
be.

What the Turks have ACTUALLY said is that they do not want an
"independent" Kurdistan, particularly one on the Eastern border of Turkey
that will doubtless seek Kurdish hegemony by incorporating well, Eastern
Turkey.

Well, there needn't be an "independent" Kurdistan. You already know what
I'm going to say: "North Iraq" will become our 53rd state. (In fact, unlike
the Emancipation Proclamation, where Lincoln freed slaves not already under
his control, the United States is ALREADY in effective control of North Iraq
now.) If 200,000 American troops are required to topple Saddam, then why not
have most of them be volunteers from our "newest" Americans, the
Kurdish-American community of North Iraq (think of the logistical savings in
terms of troop movements alone!). As in Israel and Palestine, where American
territory will border friendly regimes based in Amman and Cairo, North Iraq
will border NATO ally Turkey and free and democratic post-Saddam Iraq.

2/3 of the "Axis of Evil" will be on the run: Saddam will be out, with
North Iraq electing 2 senators (probably Republican, in gratitude to
Son-Of-Bush), and Iran will not only have a Democratic Iraq on its doorstep,
but a REALLY democratic State of North Iraq. Take that, Ayatollah Khamani!
(Actually, Iran is a bizarre society-- a functioning democracy, albeit one
powerless against its theocratic masters, whose population is FAR more
pro-American than its government; in the face of neighboring pressure, Iran
will have to clean up its act-- FAST-- or I suspect a brisque business at the
border posts of Western and Northern Iran will have that population voting
with its feet).

While it appears I say all this tongue in cheek, let's look at the "facts
on the ground": since the end of the Cold War, "free and democratic Europe"
has formed a dysfunctional, unaccountable, anti-democratic "supergovernment"
while simultaneously devolving sovereignty along the lines of petty ethnic
disputes (be it effectively independent Northern Ireland and a
quasi-independent Scotland in Britain, or the Slovaks being suddenly unable
to live with the Czechs, or God help us all, the former Yugoslavia, where
even Montenegro can't seem to live with SErbia-- and SErbia has effectively
been dismembered!). The United States, by contrast, is not only holding
strong, and holding the line AGAINST international sovereignty erosion,
continues its march toward being a multi-cultural, absolutely tolerant
society (even of its Muslim communities) in the face of the tongue-clucking
(but incredibly INTOLERANT Europeans (whose controversial politicians get
knocked off by animal rights activists!)

Maybe it is NOT such an absurd point that we should start backing up our
friendly military, economic, cultural AND MORAL hegemony with some actual
political hegemony. Again, I have my doubts that a Kurdish plebicite would
NOT favor American statehood (if offered).

And now, a discussion of our 54th and 55th states, Jammu and Kashmir...

How's That Again? - Gene Healy culls an interesting passage from Malcolm Gladwell's book, The Tipping Point:

In the 1996 Houshold Survey on Drug Abuse, 1.1 percent of those polled said that they had used heroin at least once. But only 18 percent of that 1.1 percent had used it in the past year, and only 9 percent had used it in the past month. That is not the profile of a particularly [addictive] drug. The figures for cocaine are even more striking. Of those who have ever tried cocaine, less than one percent are regular users. What these figures tell us is that experimentation and actual hard-core use are two entirely separate things.

Healy points out that the risk of being prosecuted for answering the NIDA survey is very small, so the figures are probably broadly correct. As Healy says, "this information gives the lie to the idea that once given hard drugs we'd all act like lab rats pressing the lever for more cocaine pellets."

On the Record - There is one aspect of Andrew Olmsted's otherwise praiseworthy call for the President to ask Congress to declare war on Iraq that Unqualified Offerings can't let go:

Those who oppose such an invasion would have to explain and defend their position, and place themselves on the record should a future attack prove to have come from Iraq.

Why does that only work one way? If we attack Iraq and are later attacked by those claiming to be offended by our conquest, will the war's proponents be on the hook?

This is a sensitive issue because in 1990, opponents of the first war with Iraq (UO supported it at the time) argued that it was a bad idea because it would increase the risk of terrorist attacks on America. But every time there is a terrorist attack on America - WTC I, the abortive millenium bomb plot, Khobar Towers, the Cole, the embassies, 9/11 - by people claiming to be upset by America's actions in that war, or the fallout therefrom (e.g. troops in the "Holy Land"), and those 1990 opponents suggest that there just might be a, you know, connection, they're denounced as "blaming America."

Update: War of Kurdish Suppression - It's not just Unqualified Offerings who figures that the Iraq hawks are committing the US to operations to suppress Iraq's Kurds and Marsh Arabs in the aftermath of a Saddam overthrow. So, according to Thomas E. Ricks in the Sunday Washington Post, do some of the US military's top brass:

A major goal of U.S. policy in a post-Hussein Iraq would be to prevent the creation of an independent state in the heavily Shiite south, or an independent Kurdish state in the north. To fulfill U.S. promises to Turkey and Arab states that Iraq would remain whole, a defense official said, "I think it is almost a certainty that we'd wind up doing a campaign against the Kurds and Shiites." That would represent a striking reversal of administration policy of supporting the Kurds against Baghdad.

Not only is this borrowing trouble under normal circumstances, there's an aggravating factor: for the last ten years, the US has encouraged both the Kurds and the Shi'a in a collectivist opposition to the Iraqi state. If we crush them for trying to separate, they'll see that as a betrayal, for the simple reason that it will be. And if we let them go, then Iraq's nationalists will blame us for costing their patria two thirds of its territory.

Mind Your Ps and Not-Qs - Speaking of Sheikh Shehadeh and others, Unqualified Offerings has been doing some thinking. One thing that stands out is the nimbleness of the act's apologists. First we were told, authoritatively, that bastards like Shehadeh always travel with "human shields," including children, so the IDF had no choice but to add some noncombatant lives to the toll. Now we are told, authoritatively, that the IDF and Shin Bet believed that Sheikh Shehadeh was alone and that any people in the shacks nearby would suffer no more than shrapnel wounds and glass punctures.

The two excuses don't go together.

The Lamb Shall Lie Down with the Lioness - Another interesting comment thread on Protein Wisdom, this time involving the assassination of Sheik Shehada and others in Gaza last week, featuring the unlikely pairing of Diana Moon of Letter from Gotham and Jim of Objectionable Content on the skeptics' side.

Protein Wisdom, loyal readers - where, unlike certain other sites, the comments section is not a cesspool of savagery.

You Can Win for Losing - Glenn Reynolds reads Tony Adragna who reads the House Select Committee Report on the "Homeland Security Act of 2002." Reynolds says

I hope that the whole idea craters amid partisan bickering. That won't be a failure. It'll be the system working.

He's absolutely right. The proposed Homeland Security Department is the wrong answer to the wrong problem. The question is, will we be that lucky?

Unqualified Offerings isn't optimistic. The "do something" imperative is always operative. Plus, now that the President has proposed the HSD, a defeat of the proposal counts as a defeat for him and by extension the Republicans. That means the Republicans have a powerful interest in creating something called a Department of Homeland Security. Democrats are even more vulnerable to the "do something" meme than Republicans. If they can kill it by sticking together as a block, they risk having the Repubs use that "partisan" action as a weapon against them. Plus, once the Dems figure out a way to take care of their core constituency, the public employee unions that don't like the putatively flexible personnel rules in the bill, what do you have? A proposal to create a large new government bureaucracy. That's an area where the Democratic Party has a serious immune deficiency. Ironically, analyses like Tony's will probably increase the comfort of Democratic legislators.

So: the party of (ever-so-occasionally) limited government is committed for tactical reasons, if nothing else, to getting this expansion of government passed. That leaves the party of government as the theoretical opposition. They're just not up to it. That leaves the executive branch, but it was their proposal in the first place.

Sigh.

Killing Monsters: A Theory of Justice Edition - At supper last night, Offering Boy and I began discussing Freedom Force, a superhero game for the computer that we've been playing together and that he's been working at on his own during the day.

"Daddy," he said, "I can kill O'Connor!"

'Red spy' O'Connor is the quarry in level one.

"Not kill, son, capture. Nobody dies in Freedom Force."

Freedom Force, which by the way, crashes my PC every time I'm about to win the second level, is inspired by the Silver Age comics of the early 60s. Lethality in that milieu isn't just low. You couldn't kill someone by driving a spike through their head.

"Oh yeah," he says. "Minuteman puts them in jail until they don't want to be bad guys any more?"

"That's right, son!" I beam.

"Or until they rot!"

ISO Federalism - Avedon Carol on Barney Frank, defender of States' Rights. The New York Times on John Ashcroft, who could care less whether Congress denies authorization for the Administration's TIPS program. He's pressing ahead anyway.

"Major-League Asshole" Adam Clymer in the Times provides an interesting breakdown of the TIPS opposition:

In the House, the attack on the program, known as TIPS (for Terrorism Information and Prevention System), has been led by conservative Republicans, including the majority leader Dick Armey and Representative Bob Barr of Georgia.

After a firestorm of criticism last week, mainly from conservatives, the House is prepared to prohibit the planned program in the Homeland Security Department legislation. Mr. Armey said the ban was needed so the government would not "promote citizens spying on one another."

But in the Senate, where Mr. Ashcroft appeared today, conservatives are not as concerned about privacy as their House counterparts are. So the attacks come from liberals like Senators Patrick J. Leahy of Vermont, Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts and Charles E. Schumer of New York.

Mr. Ashcroft was defended by Senator Jeff Sessions, Republican of Alabama. "We get complaints from left and right," Mr. Sessions said, noting both sets of objectors. "We have some paranoid people on the right also."

Moral of the story:

1) Jeff Sessions can bite me.

2) There's good and bad in everyone, dammit.

Now I'm in Trouble Dept. - According to Dear Prudence on Slate

While it is true that friends don't let friends drive drunk, when it comes to pomposity, there is no way to set them straight without making a mess.

On my Way in a Cloud of Dust - I did it! An entire day (Friday) with no Steve Earle posts! Scroll down if you don't believe me!

Maybe I'll get nominated for a Bloggie for this!

A Fanboy's Notes: Supplemental - Avram Gruner of the fine Pigs and Fishes weblog, brings the attention of Unqualified Offerings to the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Volume II, annotations site. (See A Fanboy's Notes: Victorian Edition below.) The authors, Jess Nevins et al, obtained an advanced copy of the book and put together the annotations page in time for the rest of us.

He's done a lot more good work on other comics too, going by his main annotations page.

Killing Monsters: Girl Power Edition - Another Gerard Jones' Book Makes Life Better item. (See item below.)

Wednesday I got "monned." That's what Mrs. Offering and I call it when semi-verbal The Littlest Offering comes to one of us, takes our hand in hers and attempts to drag us from where we are at that moment to wherever she feels we should be instead, all while saying "Mon." "Mon, Daddy." "Mon, Mommy." As in "Come on."

In this case she dragged me from this computer into the grownups' bedroom. Then she climbed onto the bed, stood and turned to face me, arms out, smiling. Locking her gaze with mine, she instructed, in her lisping toddler voice:

"Wrestle!"

We didn't keep score. But I can tell you that she gave quite a good account of herself.

Mama Tried - A Killing Monsters Chronicle - More on Killing Monsters. Unqualified Offerings called this a revelatory book below. It's also life-changing. Jones talks about the need for kids, not just boys but especially boys, to have a chance to indulge in rough play. UO finished chapter two one evening before bedtime while the Family Offering shared a room at the ABC Motel in Ligonier, PA. The next morning, it asked Offering Boy if he would like to wrestle.

Well of course he would.

We had a grand time wrestling on one of the motel beds and had a grand time wrestling on Mommy and Daddy's bed once we got home. And this site noticed something almost immediately. Offering Boy is a....spirited lad. Incredibly smart, incredibly willful, prone to outbursts when he doesn't get his way. Academically advanced, socially immature. Around the times, though, that Mom and Dad start to worry about his social development, he ends up making a genuine leap to a new level of maturity and self-control. So we don't despair. (We had him screened once. The child psychologist said he had transition problems - don't surprise him with something he doesn't want to do - but found his temper to be within "normal" ranges.)

Literally the day we started our wrestling matches, Offering Boy made a noticeable improvement in behavior. He's maintained that more self-possessed level since.

Post hoc, yes. Propter hoc? You can certainly come up with some causal explanations. The wrestling matches are time with daddy. The wrestling matches burn energy. The wrestling matches are an approved outlet for aggression. Unqualified Offerings wouldn't rule out a Hawthorn Effect. (It's not the chance to play rough. It's a change. It's attention from Daddy. But since UO is not experimenting on its son, the change is valuable for whatever reason, and Jones' book was the inspiration for the change.)

There's just one little problem.

When Unqualified Offerings was a young website, the Matron of the Offerings specifically, vociferously and repeatedly forbade wrestling on the bed. Her theory was that wrestling on beds led to beds breaking. Likewise, and who knows where such absurd notions come from, bouncing on beds like they were trampolines. But never once did a bed actually break from wrestling on it.

Back then. UO doubts very much that Offering Boy, a slim fellow at 50 pounds, could break a bed if he tried. But Unqualified Offerings itself weighs...more than 50 pounds. Yesterday, when Offering Boy hurled his father headlong toward the bottom left corner of the bed, the flange on the frame wheel bent like the knee of a Congressman in the presence of the Recording Industry Association of America and, like the Congressman, stayed bent.

Mrs. Offering was surprisingly understanding.

On the bright side, we were able to prop the frame up with a few of the many books that we keep so as never to be offended by the sight of a flat surface. On the brighter side, one of them was Doris Kearns Goodwin's No Ordinary Time.

A Fanboy's Notes: Killing Monsters Edition - Intrigued by the recommendation on Virginia Postrel's site, Unqualified Offerings read Killing Monsters: Why Children Need Fantasy, Superheroes and Make Believe Violence, by Gerard Jones, while on vacation in Western Pennsylvania.

The book is not just good. It's revelatory. UO anticipates going broke buying copies for fellow parents, educators and such members of the scare-quote helping scare-quote professions its children encounter on their journey through the soulgrinderthe public schools. (Tom Burroughs has a nice appreciation of the book on Samizdata.)

Just two weeks ago I got to see one of Jones' claims borne out with my own eyes, his thesis that children observing violent entertainment absorb what they are ready to absorb, are oblivious to what they're not ready to absorb and absent themselves from what they find truly disturbing.

Offering Boy and I have taken to watching the Justice League cartoon series together. After what I considered a weak beginning, it has improved considerably. Recently they ran a two-part adventure with the new-interpretation Aquaman. This fellow is bearded, shirtless and anti-surface dweller. He seems to owe as much to Marvel's Submariner as to DC's Silver Age Arthur Curry. In the comics covers I'd seen, he had a golden scythe in place of his left hand.

In the cartoon episode, his evil brother Orm intrigues for his throne. Since Daddy and Big Brother were watching TV, that meant The Littlest Offering, age 2, believed that she should too, so I sat for episode two with a toddler half on my lap and a six-year old in the chair next to me.

Orm shackles Aquaman to a boulder above an undersea magma stream and hangs Aquaman's swaddled baby next to him, by way of avoiding any bothersome succession problems.

"Baby!" says The Littlest Offering.

"Uh, yes," I replied, "Baby!" a little nervous, what with Mrs. Offering not having gotten to Killing Monsters yet. I decided to take the initiative.

"Baby sad," I say soberly, the way I might note that Strawberry Bear was indeed stuck between the crib slats and the wall.

Orm blasts a crack in the boulder with a ray, sending it and the captives sinking toward the magma below.

"Baby's crying," The Littlest Offering says, the way she might note that Strawberry Bear was stuck between the crib slats and the wall.

On screen, Junior wails and Aquaman struggles against his bonds.

"Baby will be okay," I assure her, sparing a concerned glance at her big brother too. Both watch intently. Neither quivers.

"Baby," says my daughter, and her tone has more of the excitement small children see at seeing someone even smaller than they are than real worry.

On screen Aquaman breaks one arm free, but try as he might, cannot bust the left shackle. Cut to a closer view of the magma.

"His daddy will protect the baby!" I say. It is impossible to say something like that without sounding like you are absorbing some of the reflected glory, or at least that is my claim.

"Yeah," she says. And: "Baby."

Aquaman fails again to break the shackle pinning his left arm to the boulder. His son sobs just out of reach. Desperate, furious, he notices the buckle on his royal belt. The sharp buckle on his royal belt. With his right hand he grabs it and raises it high. His fierce gaze turns to his left hand.

Then the scene change, of course. Cut to the Royal Chambers, where the Justice League waits with Queen Mera. Aquaman appears carrying his son. ("Baby!" exclaims The Littlest Offering.) When he hands the baby to his wife, the audience gets its first view of the bandaged stump of his left arm. Then a scene of him on an operating table before he appears with that golden scythe.

During the interval, Green Lantern says it just proves Aquaman is crazy to "do that." Someone else (Hawkgirl?) challenges, asking, wouldn't GL do it to protect his own child? The conversation is discreet but unmistakeable.

Unless you're Offering Boy. What I can tell, watching and talking to him, is that he never quite absorbs just what has happened, beyond the fact that Aquaman has saved his son. (I certainly make sure he gets that part...)

It's all a textbook example of Gerard Jones Theory in action: my daughter translates the action into terms that make sense to her - A baby! It's crying... Baby feels better now - and Offering Boy enjoys a great deal of animated excitement, whose most disturbing sequence makes no impression whatsoever. (In the spirit of research, I just now sat him on my knee and quizzed him on what he remembered about the episode. He had to be reminded that Aquaman saved his infant son at all - clearly a drag in the reflected glory department.)

It's to the creators' credit that the script and animation was structured to enable understanding of the story to "fail gracefully," to borrow a software development concept. I can't help thinking that, in my lifetime, busybodies with bad theories would have deprived the three of us of that pleasant half hour together, because they opposed any violence in children's programming. (Mark Evanier's classic account of the pernicious influence of "watchdog groups" on children's television is on his website.) There would have been only network TV, the watchdogs would have insisted on a superhero show with no actual fighting or anything actually threatening, and the networks, weenies that they are, would have caved. Maybe my daughter would have liked the stupid little robot they'd stick in it; Offering Boy might even have been mildly entertained; but I'd have been bored out of my mind. Which means I likely wouldn't have watched at all, which means the experience would be worse for my kids, not better.

Happily, the profusion of cable tv meant more programming than even the busiest of bodies could suck the life out of, though not for lack of trying.

A Fanboy's Notes: Victorian Edition - The first issue of League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Volume II is out! If you need to be told, League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is a comic book about a superhero group - in 1898. The members include Alan Quatermain, Captain Nemo, the Invisible Man, Henry Jekyll (and partner) and Miss Wilheminha Murray, formerly Mina Harker. The assemblage is the creation of Campion Bond. Actually it's the creation of the great Alan Moore and artist Kevin O'Neill, and published by the America's Best Comics imprint.

In the first six-issue miniseries, the League found itself being used as pawns in a war between Professor Moriarty and Fu Manchu. The movie adaptation, with Sean Connery in the role of Alan Quatermain, began filming this month. (It is scheduled for a Summer 2003 release.) Moore has a huge amount of fun with Victorian propriety and hypocrisy. One worries lest Gertrude Himmelfarb, who is getting up there and likely prone to shocks, should come across it. The chief irony of the first series is less that the divorcee, Miss Murray, regarded as a slut and a scandal by her own teammates, is clearly the most stable and effective member of the group than that Murray herself earnestly cleaves to the very code that condemns her.

How much fun is this? This much: Unqualified Offerings has been an off-and-on comics fan since it was just a boy weblog. Mrs. Offering was not. Came the day that UO happened into a comics store, breaking a years'-long dry spell, and picked up the first issue of League on a friend's recommendation.

In stereotypical fashion, UO was driving that day and Mrs. Offering was in the passenger seat. So on the trip home, the history buff and anglophile used just the tips of her fingers to tug the first issue of League out of the bag, and commenced turning pages, a faint sneer playing about her lips.

The sneer dissolved - "This isn't bad." - then transmogrified into rapt interest. She finished it in the car and gobbled up all subsequent issues.

The last image in the first miniseries was Wells's Martian warships descending to earth. Almost the entire first issue of the new volume takes place on Mars itself. That means John Carter makes an appearance, as does a mysterious man on a flying carpet named "Gullivar." This turns out not to be Swift's "Gulliver," but Lieutenant Gulliver Jones. No, Unqualified Offerings never heard of him either. Good thing we have Google now, huh? Jones was the creation of Edwin L. Arnold, and thought by Richard A. Lupoff and others to be Burroughs' inspiration for John Carter. (David Bruce Bozarth's skeptical account of the influence theory is available on the ERB mailing list site.)

Alan Moore knows way more about the history of British fantasy adventure than you do. And his style is to make no concessions for it. (If, like Unqualified Offerings, you're playing catchup, you can find the entire text of Gulliver of Mars at The Jolly Roger.) Much of the dialogue in Vol. II, Issue 1 is in Martian - word-balloons full of non-roman characters. You only get english when Gulliver and Carter confer directly. The art carries the narrative burden, which was occasionally hard on the aging eyes of this website, if no one else. O'Neill is an interesting cartoonist, but he is a...post-perspectival one, and goes in for a fair amount of detail in some of the Martian scenes.

Which is to say, it can be hard to figure out what the hell is going on sometimes. But there's a grandeur to it, as Gulliver and Carter lead their own Martian allies against "the mollusks" we know from Wells, who turn out not to be native Martians at all, but invaders of Mars too, and who also turn out to be using Mars as a staging ground for an attack on Earth. Our Heroes (and Heroine) appear, silently determined, only in the last three pages. One assumes that Moore will contrive to have Carter and Gulliver join them at some point.

You should almost certainly join them too.

Joys of Capitalism: Post-Marxist Division - Mr. Brendan O'Neill of Spiked-Online, successor, UO is told, to Marxism Today, announces on his weblog that he won't be posting "until next Tuesday, as I'm off to Portugal to see the mighty Radiohead in concert."

Unqualified Offerings is fond of Brendan O'Neill and Spiked both, and is pleased that, under capitalism, Brendan can afford to nip off to another country just to attend a concert.

Poetry Friday - (Re last week's statement that I'd be sticking largely to poems touching on politics in this feature, I might mention that I consider the following to be a very political poem.)

A Good Sign, Really

Something like a strawberry milkshake wells
When I press the abcess on the black cat’s tail
The way the veterinarian instructed.
While my wife pins him to the table top
He writhes as best he can and leaks low moans,
And my small son screams and screams for us to stop it.

© 2002 by Jim Henley

Goodbye is All We Got Left to Say - A last Steve Earle note. (Promises, promises! cry Loyal Readers.) Eric Olsen managed to contact the reporter who wrote "both" stories that sparked the big set-to, the longer Reuters piece and the shorter, less-informative - let's just come right out and say "distorted" - NY Post piece. Those are scare-quotes around the word "both" above: as some people already guessed, the author, Aly Sujo, wrote one story, the text of which is substantially that of the Reuters piece, and placed it with both markets. In Olsen's words, "you have to go back to the Post and the Reuters stories to fully appreciate what vicious havoc the Post editors wreaked on this man's work."

Of Course You Realize This Means War - We were doing so well, what with Glenn Reynolds avowing that Unqualified Offerings, along with Steven Chapman, "is filling the intelligent-critic-of-the-war niche that has been left so spectacularly vacant..." It was very kind of him to say that. But then, as part of the Steve Earle War, he resorts to weapons of mass destruction:

Thought experiment: Just after the Jasper, Texas incident, Lee Greenwood releases a song sympathetically looking inside the mind of a guy who lynches some black people. Same analysis?

Forget the insult to Earle that comes with being compared to Lee Greenwood. What about the innocent victims, which is to say, us? Every day that goes by in which one does not think of Lee Greenwood is a day to be treasured. He is the smallpox of singers - even if you fight his memory off, the bout leaves you scarred.

Retaliation will be proportionate to the offense. Unqualified Offerings will respond to the thought experiment, but in the tradition of "a time and manner of our choosing," it will go beyond that. That will mean delaying the time in which its readers manage to forget about the existence of Lee Greenwood again. Unqualified Offerings regrets the cost to innocents, but this is a fight for our way of life.

So, to the thought experiment:

1) Lee Greenwood wouldn't have the balls.

2) Lee Greenwood wouldn't have the talent to pull it off if he did have the balls.

3) If he did it, there would be a huge outcry.

4) Many of the people defending Earle would be attacking Greenwood.

5) Many of the people attacking Earle would be defending Greenwood.

6) Some folks now attacking Earle would attack Greenwood and some folks now defending Earle would defend Greenwood.

6) While it would prove some of Earle's current defenders hypocrites - and some of his attackers too - the fact that a man numbers hypocrites among his defenders doesn't make his attackers right.

Now, maybe Lee Greenwood, dreadful hack that he is, isn't quite the apposite comparison. What if a geniunely talented songwriter like, oh, Randy Newman, wrote a song from the perspective of a racist, apartheid-era South African, or a racist American cracker or a despiser of the differently-altitudinous? You already know:

In Newman's case, much of the controversy has come from the fact that he frequently uses a first-person vantage point as a songwriting vehicle for the characters he creates. The more feeble-minded among us then simply assume that the outrageous bigotry espoused in "Short People," "Rednecks" and "Christmas in Capetown"; the hedonistic vainglory of "My Life Is Good"; and, more recently, the embarrassing pedo-perversion of "Shame" are Newman singing in character, rather than of character.

"I find it interesting to lay a guy out there-defects and all-and let him make the best case for himself that he can make," laughs Newman. "Maybe I'm incapable of making a direct statement using myself as a romantic figure and writing a 'Mandy' or an 'Every Breath You Take.' I don't see myself that way. It's somehow an exalted thing to be talking about your love to the American people. I'm more interested in people who aren't heroes."

Fun Fact: UO once read a profile of Newman, after the "Short People" controversy, in which he said, sardonically, "Maybe I was right about the little bastards all along..."

Moving on. We now come to the massive retaliation part of this item. Unqualified Offerings will now present a political critique of Lee Greenwood's signature tune, "God Bless the USA," a little essay Unqualified Offerings likes to call

Lee Greenwood, Un-American

If tomorrow all the things were gone
I'd worked for all my life
And I had to start again with just
my children and my wife
I'd thank my lucky stars
to be living here today
'Cause the flag still stands for freedom,
and they can't take that away

Who's this "they?" Is Greenwood some kind of conspiracy theorist? But it's at the chorus where the real trouble begins:

And I'm proud to be an American
Where at least I know I'm free

"At least?" There's a ringing declaration for you. "I'm proud [that]....at least..." anything is about as mealy-mouthed an encomium as you can get. Come on, Lee, we want you to be happy! Oh but it gets worse:

And I won't forget the men who died
Who gave that right to me

My that-under-which-we-are-indivisible, Lee! This is the worst misprision of an American understanding of the sources of freedom one can have. Stop me if you've heard this one before: "All men are endowed by their Creator!" The government and its armies, conscripts or otherwise, don't give you any rights whatsoever. You were born with them, to the American way of thinking. Not "Congress shall grant..." but "Congress shall make no law abridging..." The rights come first. The Nigerian journalist has the same right to freedom of the press that the American one does. It is simply that his right is abridged. If you're lucky, the government, in the form of those "men who died" or one of its other incarnations, may occasionally act to preserve those rights. That is itself no mean service. But to say that the State or the Army gives rights is a, well, it's a foreign concept. Kind of a Euroweenie concept if you think about it.

You think the inherent rights view is a myth? Okay fine, it's our myth. Go get your own if you don't like it, maybe wherever the Republic of Lee Greenwood is.

And I'll gladly stand up next to you
and defend her still today
'Cause there ain't no doubt, I love this land

"I just don't understand it."

The second and last verse is potted geography.

From the lakes of Minnesota
to the hills of Tennessee
Across the plains of Texas,
from sea to shining sea
From Detroit down to Houston,
and New York to L.A.
Well, there's pride in every American heart,
and it's time we stand and say

Call UO suspicious, but this is the sort of information that Lee Greenwood, maybe in his secret office at EU headquarters in Brussels, could put together from travel brochures and internet sites. There's no proof that Lee Greenwood likes any of those places, whether red-zone or blue.

Dupe or mastermind? UO can't say. But it knows that Greenwood's song represents such a stunning miseducation in civics that it fears to reckon the damage it has done over the last two decades. Then there are the esthetic consequences.

And That's Not All - Anent Britain's war on drugs, becoming as vicious and futile as the one here in the US, Natalie Solent writes

"Wars on drugs" are like drugs themselves: one of their major evils is that they can't be quit without a vast traumatic spasm, and they leave behind them harmful effects that go on long after you quit.

Supplemental point: It's not just the drugs part. That's how war works too.

Revise and Extend - Avedon Carol has an interesting meditation on what she considers the virtues of contemporary liberalism in response to UO's item of last night regarding liberal blogs. The whole thing is worth reading, though it should be tempered with the knowledge that, as Glenn Reynolds notes in his latest FoxNews column, excrescences like the newly-propose RAVE Act show just how little Democratic Party politicians care about your liberties.

Now, a clarification: Avedon writes

Now he's talking about liberal weblogs and wondering when we are going to field our version of Instapundit - someone who posts frequently the way Glenn Reynolds does.

Ginger Stampley, who was also kind enough to pick up on yesterday's item, describes me as "looking for the great lefty blog star." But I wasn't doing either of those things. I was wondering when a liberal blog star would arise who exhibits in his or her personal blogging conduct generosity (after all a liberal totem word) toward non-star liberal bloggers.

(Avedon and Ginger are stars as far as Unqualified Offerings is concerned, but it rates by quality rather than traffic.)

A Case for Song - Here's an LA Weekly profile of singer/songwriter/film composer Randy Newman from last fall. Interestingly, the interview itself was conducted on September 11, though the attacks taking place that day are not the focus of the interview. But here's a striking passage:

"You know, you see it and it's almost too big to look at," he says of the hijackings. "Then somebody told me that a guy in the plane that crashed near Pittsburgh went to the bathroom and called 911 and said the plane was being hijacked." He shakes his head. "When you hear an individual story -- a guy in the men's room, and then the plane crashed -- it makes it rougher somehow. You hear there's a guy, and it becomes real to you. That he had the bravery to say that. It makes it worse."

The interview is a fascinating discussion of why serious songwriters do what they do. Why does Unqualified Offerings bring this up? We'll get back to that after this site takes Offering Boy and The Littlest Offering out to help the Matron of all Offerings do some shopping.

UPDATE: Because of a dumbass problem, early versions of this item lacked the actual link to the LA Weekly story. Unqualified Offerings regrets that it can't afford better help around here.

I Spy - Warblogger Watch has redesigned. It no longer takes forever to load a page you can't read anyway.

Demoblogger Charles Kuffner has moved Off the Kuff to its own domain, and switched to Movable Type. Hopefully, he will soon change his body text from that annoying, hard-to-read grey that is MT's default text color.

Speaking of Demobloggers, the newish Green[e]house Effect briefly covers The Steve Earle Affair and also analyzes the prospects of Democratic Heartthrob-in-Waiting Howard Dean, Governor of Vermont. Dean seems to be popping up on the radar of liberal bloggers more and more. Does this guy really have a chance, or is he 2004's Bruce Babbitt? Liberals seem to like him because he "supports national health care and a tax hike." Saints preserve us. Time was when even Democrats quailed at the prospect of raising taxes during a recession. Keynes really is dead, isn't he?

On the general "I Spy" front, there seem to be a lot of newish liberal/left weblogs, don't there? Is it a reaction to the earlier success of right-wing bloggers, or a reaction to the sort of news - juicy corporate scandals, Republican flummery, bad economic times - that make Democratic blood sing?

What the Left lacks is an Instapundit. Sure, there are popular liberal bloggers, like Josh Marshall and - help me out here... Eric Alterman? But there's no hugely popular liberal/left blogger who is willing to reinvest his readership capital in subsidiaries, as Glenn Reynolds has done. Marshall and Alterman seem to have the legacy-media horror of "downlinking" that Virginia Postrel discerned in Andrew Sullivan. You can criticize Reynolds for preferring to link to weak material by people with congenial opinions rather than strong material by people who challenge them. (Unqualified Offerings has no personal standing to complain any more.) But Reynolds happily "shared the wealth" and helped nurture a cadre of libertarian-flavored center-right supporters of an expansive war, and likely increased his own readershio by doing so. (For Good - or Evil... yah yah yah.)

Who will do the same for the new crowd? Don't the likes of Marshall and Alterman want a posse?

Second Thoughts - Feces Flinging Monkey notices, as Unqualified Offerings should have, that Israel killed a lot more people than just Sheikh and he isn't too happy about it:

The bad news is that they killed him by dropping a one-ton bomb on an occupied, three story apartment building in the middle of the night. Current reports are 15 dead, mostly children, and "hundreds" wounded.

They say they had several chances to get him recently, but held off because they didn't want to kill too many civilians. I believe that.

They are also claiming that they were surprised that so many civilians were hurt, claiming an "intelligence failure". I think they are full of shit.

I'll give them the benefit of the doubt; they must have had a compelling reason to hit him, right now, regardless of the cost, because they normally don't do stuff like this.

Well, I hope they had a goddamn good reason, because this was fucked up. This was the sort of thing I'd expect from their enemies, not from them.

Unfortunately, when dealing with the Sharon administration there is always the suspicion that these assassinations (and their "collateral damage") are timed to stir things up just as they start to calm down.

(Link via Instapundit.com.)

You're Still Standing There - Reflecting yesterday morning on The Steve Earle Affair, Unqualified Offerings decided that it had unfairly mischaracterized aspects of Porphrogenitus' arguments. Porphy certainly agreed, as he noted in a long e-mail and, obliquely, in a post to his own weblog. Let UO state for the record that

1) Porphy really didn't discuss Earle's character, but rather his ideology. That distinguishes him from other members of the "antis."

2) Even if _Earle_ is not an example of the "anti-American, freedom for now" leftie type Porphy adduces, the Revolution Books manager quoted in the story certainly is. This demonstrates his broader point, about the stance of some leftists, even if Earle himself does not.

However, there remains no reason on earth for anyone, left or otherwise, to "distance themselves" from Steve Earle or his song, as Porphy seemed to require.

Also, the Group Dumbass Award in this matter goes to all commentators who referred to Earle's "failing career." The man does quite nicely for himself, having had the capitalist good sense to found his own record company. Not getting played on country radio, which just may be the most artistically-bankrupt format going (it faces stiff competition with so-called "alternative" rock), is perilously close to a badge of honor these days.

The Evidence Mounts that Steve Earle really is prone to empathize with scoundrels of the worst sort. UO Reader/snowbird Mary LaCroix (posting to the Elvis Costello list) notes this passage from Earle's own website:

I understand why none of those congressmen voted against The Patriot Act, out of respect for the Trade Center victims' families.

Here's more from the man's own mouth. Speaking as a firebreathing right-winger, there's not a word in the next paragraph that I'd disagree with:

This is a political record because there seems no other proper response to the place we're at now. But I'm not trying to get myself deported or something. In a big way this is the most pro-American record I've ever made. In fact, I feel URGENTLY American. I understand why none of those congressmen voted against The Patriot Act, out of respect for the Trade Center victims' families. I've sat in the death house with victims' families, seen them suffer. But this is an incredibly dangerous piece of legislation. Freedoms, American freedoms, things voted into law as American freedoms, everything that came out of the 1960's, are disappearing, and as any patriot can see, that has to be opposed.

This is a political weblog because there neems no other proper response to the place we're at now. Surely other weblogs, even those with vastly different viewpoints, could say the same. Earle has more to say that I'm less in sympathy with, but the man's stubborn refusal to clear his opinions with me is well-advanced. Still, the following passage is far from a ringing endorsement of Walker's actions and beliefs.

I'm happy with the way the song came out, but I'm nervous, not for myself, but I have taken some serious liberties with Walker, speaking as him, in his voice. I'm trying to make clear that wherever he got to, he didn't arrive there in a vacuum. I don't condone what he did. Still, he's a 20 year-old kid. My son Justin is almost exactly Walker's age. Would I be upset if he suddenly turned up fighting for the Islamic Jihad? Sure, absolutely. Fundamentalism, as practiced by the Taliban, is the enemy of real thought, and religion too. But there are circumstances. Walker was from a very bohemian household, from Marin County. His father had just come out of the closet. It's hard to say how that played out in Walker's mind. He went to Yemen because that's where they teach the purest kind of Arabic. He didn't just sit on the couch and watch the box, get depressed and complain. He was a smart kid, he graduated from high school early, the culture here didn't impress him, so he went out looking for something to believe in.

I've said before that I'm not much impressed by the fact that Walker "was willing to fight for his beliefs." I'd rather Walker had just sat on the couch and watch the box. Your troubadour sorts like Earle will be more vulnerable to that line. But what we're really seeing here, I think, is the instinctive sympathy of a father with a troubled conscience. That is some seriously good songwriting material.

Wilderness of Gasbags? - According to Harrington's Post article, vociferous Earle critic and Nashville talk show host Steve Gill "as a Nashville lawyer once defended Earle, 47, in a case involving a scuffle with police in Texas."

Obviously the only thing this story has lacked is a conspiracy-theory angle. So: you don't suppose Gill is in on it with Earle, do you? Whipping up some potentially lucrative controversy for his old client?

Unqualified Offerings is just asking, you understand.

Start Your Engines

In fact, the upcoming Springsteen album, "The Rising," includes a song titled "Paradise," a first-person narrative at least partly representing the view of a Palestinian suicide bomber.

From Richard Harrington's Washington Post article this morning about, you guessed it, "John Walker's Blues" and Steve Earle.

Desperate Measures - Eve Tushnet's main page is blank, probably due to a Blogger problem. But until she gets around to republishing, you can view current Eve by going straight to her July archive page.

I Feel Alright - The post below peters out rather than concluding. And I'm going to have to save the Joe Jackson angle for another item. But here's a handy list of Earle Affair news and commentary:

Glenn Reynolds picks up the story from Porphyrogenitus, who cites the NY Post story. Porphyrogenitus initially misses the fact that the song is in the voice of a persona (Walker) because the Post itself has no clue.

Matt Welch offers first a useful post and then a brilliant post.

Charles Oliver defends Earle's song as falling solidly within the tradition of country songs about marginal and/or criminal characters. He later links to an ABCNews story that is less sensationalist and more informative than the NY Post and gives blogdom its first look at the actual lyrics.

For good measure, Charles reprints the lyrics to a classic Tom T. Hall song about a fictional spree killer during World War II.

Of all people, Ramesh Ponnuru of National Review Online, weighs in with a cautious, preliminary defense. He notes that Earle can be longwinded about his causes in concert, though he fails to mention that the version of "NYC" during the El Corazan tour, with Buddy Miller on guitar, rocked so fucking hard I about pounded my thighbones to powder at the Birchmere.

Porphyrogenitus argues that it doesn't matter if the song is in the voice of a persona, what matters, for the purpose of judging Earle's character, is the personae he chooses to adopt.

In his own roundup, Glenn Reynolds notes that "some people who have actually heard the Earle song seem to interpret it the way that talk radio has." The "some people" are folks like the manager of Revolution Bookstore in New York City, that is, dipshits.

"Norwegian Blogger" weighs in, though why is never made quite clear. "However generally country music seems to go on the formula of your car breaking down, your dog dies, you lose your job, your house breaks down, and you catch some loathsome disease." To translate from the Norwegian: "My concept of country music is approximately 30 years out of date, but I amuse myself."

Dr. Frank takes it all in stride: "All's fair in songwriting, and any angle, no matter how nuts, is worth exploring. Or better yet, it's worth listening to an out of control wreck of a man exploring it. And Walker Lindh did look a bit like Jesus before his jail haircut, though I don't know about this "rising into the sky" business." Then in a longer and even deeper post, he gives us the best writing yet on the subject by a blogger not named Matt Welch:

On the other hand, the relationship between singer-songwriter and character can be pretty complicated, the line between them hard to pin down. If you're making a serious attempt to tell a story from a character's point of view, you have to attempt to understand where he's coming from, to be able "try on" his outlook. That requires a degree of sympathy, by definition. Add to all of this the fact that many songwriters are themselves a little unstable to begin with, and you can get into some murky, and occasionally scary, territory. And it's true that some songs really are a direct expression of the singer's true sentiments (that is, sometimes the "I" in the song really is the singer-- though the process of casting your sentiments into a form that rhymes and has a good beat turns them into something other than the straightforward "diary entry" that some people seem to imagine they ought to be. )

South Nashville Blues - So the Steve Earle story broke this afternoon and Unqualified Offerings figured it had all kinds of things to say. But Unqualified Offerings works for a living, and by the time it had leisure to blog, Matt Welch had said pretty much everything there was to say on the matter. And what Welch didn't say, Charles Oliver did.

UO hates it when that happens! (A Nashville exec said that Country Radio would keep Earle's new album off its playlists. Oliver asks: How would he notice. Country Radio, which is the sort of institution that gives "pusillanimity" a bad name, has been too scared of causing some soccer mom to wreck her minivan to play Earle for more than a decade now.)

So instead Unqualified Offerings will talk about Joe Jackson and Robert Frost. Robert Frost once said that he would never want to be without his prejudices - they were the ground on which he stood and from which he could see the world. He had some disagreeable ones: He hated homosexuals and blacks. (He rather liked Jews and Native Americans.) You don't know as much about Frost's retrograde opinions on blacks and gays because, unlike Eliot's and Pound's antisemitism, Frost's bigotries don't explicitly feature in his work. Why? I like to think that it's because he knew that it wasn't really praiseworthy to feel this way.

But readers of this site from July Fourth will recall Frost's narrative poem, "The Black Cottage," and suspect that Frost's own problematic relationship with "the principle / that all men are created free and equal" helps propel that meditation on the notion. There's another poem from North of Boston, "A Hundred Collars," whose subtext is a farcical homoerotic anxiety.

Neither poem confirms Frost's real-life prejudices, and that's one of their merits. We ask poets to be wiser than they know. Also that they delight us. Those two things comprise the entire job description. The same goes for songwriters and novelists. Yeats believed the silliest shit you could imagine. And he wrote "The Stolen Child" and "The Second Coming" and "Leda and the Swan." What separates so-called "creative writers" from those of us in the gasbagging line is that they have a medium and a talent that let them write smarter than they think.

Steve Earle has described himself as more of a communist than a liberal. That makes him, to my mind, a political dipshit. But I don't need Steve Earle to be sensible politically. I need him to, as a poet friend of mine says as her highest encomium, "add to the available stock of reality." Let's skip right past "Copperhead Road," a song with more American history in it than a hundred conservative weblogs. Let's look at a political song where the most objectionable passage is the best part of the song for people who don't share Earle's outlook! "Over Yonder (Jonathan's Song)" is written in the voice of a death-row inmate who was killed after, Earle firmly believes, finding god and repenting of his deeds. It's a beautiful tune. Here are the last couple of verses:

I suppose I got it comin'
I can't ever pay enough
All my rippin' and a runnin'
I hurt everyone I loved

The world'll turn around without me
The sun'll come up in the east
Shinin' down on all of them that hate me
I hope my goin' brings 'em peace

The grudging "I suppose I got it comin'..." is pretty well undercut by the last two lines: It's all about me. It's a very conservative notion that the criminal impulse is nothing but "It's all about me" raised to the level of violence or fraud. Is Earle being purposefully ironic at Jonathan's expense here? Or does he get the criminal viewpoint so exactly because he endorses it, if unconsciously? I suspect the latter, but it doesn't matter. The song is wise, even if the songwriter is not.

We haven't actually heard "Johnny Walker's Blues" yet, or seen the complete lyrics, but here's an excerpt from the ABCNews.com story:

We came to fight the jihad, our hearts were pure and strong.

We filled the air with our prayers and we prayed for our martyrdom.

Allah has some other plans, a secret not revealed.

Now they're dragging me back with my head in the sack to the land of the infidel.

If I should die, I'll rise up to the sky like Jesus

A few things jump out from the excerpt:

1) This is obviously a persona-song: it's not just about John Walker Lindh, it purports to be in his voice.

2) John Walker Lindh sounds like a dipshit. Does Earle believe it himself? One more time: it doesn't matter.

I'm just an American boy, raised on MTV,

And I've seen all the kids in the soda pop bands,

But none of them look like me.

So I started looking round, and I heard the word of God.

And the first thing I heard that made sense was the word

of Allah, Peace be upon him

3) Earle's real problem is not political. He appears to be perilously close to "Fallacy of Imitative Form" territory here. (You know, if you're writing about boredom, don't be boring. If you're writing about a screwed-up young man with a fundamentally banal mind, don't be banal.) Song lyrics don't necessarily work on the page. They have to work sung, with the chosen accompaniment. But Earle may not be making the job any easier here.

Sauce for the Gander - One of its first posts, Unqualified Offerings noted that it couldn't get too worked up over the assassination of Israeli Cabinet Minister/whackbrain Rehavam Ze'evi. So it's worth noting that UO's reaction to the assassination by Israel of Sheikh Salah Shehada, head of the military wing of Hamas, is: Gee, that's too bad.

Yes, the timing likely indicates that Sharon is worried that peace might break out. Under his administration, these targeted assassinations have a funny way of being scheduled for periods when the violence is beginning to die down. And there's the real possibility that, as Israel starts to worry that Palestinian elections really might take place, they'll find excuses to start taking out the candidates they don't like. But Shehada is nowhere near the list of folks whose passing is to be mourned. Far from it. Unqualified Offerings sympathizes with the situation of the Palestinians. But not all the Palestinians.

Dept of Finally! - At last an Iraq hawk with a soft spot for the Constitution. With all the excited talk about when and how "President Bush will invade" Iraq and all the breathless speculation about surprise attack scenarios, one could be forgiven for wondering if any of the enthusiasts for a wider war thought there was something wrong with just the President committing the country to a major war and occupation on his own say-so. After all, in a column we will probably need to come back to, warhawk Robert Kagan avers that

Not only Europeans but Americans, too, ought to know the kind of task they're about to undertake. For if the Bush administration is serious, then the United States is on the verge of making a huge commitment in Iraq and the Middle East, not unlike the commitment it made in Japan more than a half-century ago.

The idea then was not simply to get rid of a dangerously aggressive Imperial Japanese government, nor merely to deny the Japanese the capacity to launch another Pearl Harbor. It was to rebuild Japanese politics and society, roughly in the American image. American policy in Japan, as in Germany, was "nation-building" on a grand scale, and with no exit strategy. Almost six decades later there are still American troops on Japanese soil.

Iraq may not be that different. Surrounded as it is by vulnerable friends such as Turkey, by Arab states of tenuous legitimacy, such as Jordan and Saudi Arabia, and by such worrisome nations as Iran and Syria, Iraq's success after Hussein's fall will be a vital American interest if ever there was one. If the United States goes into Iraq, it better be ready to stay there for as long as it takes.

Now Kagan doesn't explcitly call for doing all that republican stuff like have the President ask Congress for a declaration of war and abide by its decision. But Unqualified Offerings is pleased to report that Andrew Olmsted does.

While I have maintained for some time it is in the best interests of the country for us to remove Saddam Hussein from power at the earliest opportunity, the Bush Administration has yet to make a strong case for that, and Congress has been too busy worrying about Wall Street to consider the question of what the next step to protect America should be. A formal request for a declaration of war would serve two valuable purposes.

First, it would force the country to have an open debate about what needs to be done to win this war. The Bush Administration would have to be very open about why it believed an invasion of Iraq was justified to protect America. Those who oppose such an invasion would have to explain and defend their position, and place themselves on the record should a future attack prove to have come from Iraq.

Second, such a declaration would ensure our entire government had committed itself to a course of action. There could be no attempt by Congress to disassociate itself from the negative consequences of such an attack after the fact.

It's time for both branches of government to step up to the plate and assume their Constitutional duties.

It would be a great opportunity to reconcile "wars end" with "Iraq may not be that different" from a six-decade occupation. Demanding that the Bush Administration follow not just the spirit but the letter of the Constitution by adhering to Section 8, Clause 11 would be a fine way for otherwise libertarian hawks to separate themselves from the frank imperialists they've made (hopefully temporary) common cause with. Andrew Olmsted isn't a libertarian, though. Darn.

The Twain Meet II - And now Unqualified Offerings wants to remind its liberal friends that their bête noir, Dick Armey, is standing singlehandedly athwart the TIPS program and the national ID card proposal crying stop.

Let UO hear you give it up for Dick Armey, folks!

The Twain Meet - Leftia Avedon Carol is on about those bothersome civil liberties again:

But the trouble with being able to mention them in court is more than just that they prejudice the jury, although they do that as well. The big trouble with this, as with suspension of the double-jeopardy rule, is that it encourages the criminal justice system to do sloppy and corrupt work. If the cops and prosecutors don't have to prove their cases, it encourages them to bring up charges without evidence because they know that if they keep doing it, the fact of their own repeated (potentially false) accusations becomes "evidence".

The cops and courts already use sleazy tactics to punish people who they know have done nothing wrong. They make big splashy raids on people that generate headlines about, say, the bust-up of a major child porn ring, with the names and pictures of the accused (and pictures of their homes, and their addresses, and the names of their employers) on evidence so flimsy that most anyone in the country could be found to have the same "evidence" around the house - but they're really after the victim because he's gay, or is an activist who has annoyed someone powerful. Exoneration never gets the same kind of headlines. A single sex crime charge can itself completely disrupt your home and career, and that's bad enough, but imagine - after all that damage has been done - finally winning an acquittal only to learn that as far as your record is concerned, it's not much different from having been found guilty. And they can keep doing it over and over until some jury thinks they've seen a preponderance of evidence of a "pattern" of illegal behavior.

This is just one of a bunch of bad "reforms" advocated by the Blair government's latest Criminal Justice White Paper. Another is refusing trial by jury in many cases. As the British libertarians on Samizdata.net have repeatedly noted, Britain instituted draconian abridgements of the right to bear arms; it "Americanized" its previously relaxed drug laws and enforcement; then it went to war on the most basic right there is: the right to defend yourself from imminent violent harm. You can not only get sued for defending yourself against a criminal attacker, you can get imprisoned.

Crime, golly, shot up. Now the British public is up in arms over a crime problem that anti-freedom policies caused in the first place. The government's plan: restrict more freedoms.

It's worth noting that at the last DC blogfest, a genuinely nice fellow who consults for the Republican Liberty Caucus told me that there is simply no commitment to liberty by liberals any more at all. Avedon Carol is an entirely sufficient refutation of his claim.

This is why libertarians make a mistake if they put all their eggs in the Republican basket. It is true that Bill Clinton's administration was a disaster for civil liberties and property rights. Republicans opposed Clinton on some of this because they were out of the White House. It made sense for libertarians to support them in those efforts. (Even though they fucked up the Waco hearings bigtime and the Ruby Ridge hearings were saved by the intervention of much-despised Patrick Leahy, a Democrat.)

I have no doubt that, had Gore won the election, September 11th would have happened anyway, and we would still have had something like USA-PATRIOT and the TIPS proposal - this last with a bigger role for public employee unions. And yes, a lot of Democrats and Demobloggers who criticize these Bush administration moves would be composing apologetics for them, and deriding their Republican opponents as "psychopathic Gore haters." Instead of strained efforts to tie the hijackings and anthrax attacks to a foreign "axis of evil," we'd be hearing all about the potential future threats of cooperation between Jihadists and the "far right" - where "far right" = "anyone who opposes any program favored by any Democratic Party interest group whatsoever." In other words, we would get the Dick Morris-Bill Clinton post-Oklahoma City program all over again.

(I pointedly do not include Avedon Carol among the list of subjunctive apologists. Note that she is fiercely criticising judicial "reform" proposals put forth by Britain's Labor Party, and she's no one's idea of a Tory sympathizer.)

An accident of history has the Republicans making the dire proposals (the panopticon state, endless prophylactic war) and some Democrats opposing them. The problem is overreaching government, not one particular party. We are Dorothy, the small and meek, we libertarians are. We have to be nimble enough to take our friends where we find them.

The End is in Sight - It was hard while he was on vacation, especially since it was more than one week. You get into the habit of reading someone, admiring them, depending on them, and suddenly they're not there. You make do by turning to other blogs, pushing it out of your mind, but let's face it - the man has achieved a certain deserved prominence because he's not really replaceable. You wish the guy well, but on some level, dammit, you just want the bastard to get back behind the keyboard and post something. For you.

Thank heavens Patrick Nielsen Hayden is about done with his Clarion duties (if Unqualified Offerings reads its calendar right) and Electrolite should have new material again soon.

Damned If You Did and damned if you didn't. Catallaxy Files mentions complaints that Australian PM John Howard and like-minded "neoliberals" (smaller-government advocates) in that country "are not entitled to bitch about things if they used to be poor and enjoyed the beneficience of publicly funded education and the like." This is similar to criticisms of Phil Gramm during his (raise your hand if you remember it) abortive presidential run back in - whenever the hell it was.

They get you both ways, these defenders of big government. If you grew up modestly and thus fell into some putative safety net or other you have no right to eliminate programs you benefitted from. Not that you had any choice, being a tot, and likely not that you had much chance to avoid them either. However, if you are the rare adult who didn't receive some entitlement or form of public assistance growing up, that makes you a child of privilege, and thus you have no right to eliminate programs on which those less fortunate than you depend.

Seems like they've got both sides of that one naile