That's Gotta Hurt - Actual link hed on washingtonpost.com tonight: "Army Beats Navy With Bush in Crowd." That's gotta hurt. Must be hard to swing a bush in the middle of all those people though.

Silver Linings - My sister has been talking with a lot of recruiters and placement people. They tell her that they are already seeing a loosening of the job market from its recent dire constriction. The ones she has spoken to say that their business is generally six months or so ahead of the evening news: they knew perfectly well there was a slowdown by last spring; that they are finding more openings now; and that many of their contacts among employers tell them that they expect to add head count as early as the January Bedgets season. I realize that this may be something recruiters tell jobless pregnant woment to make them feel better. But it fits with the apparently strong shopping Christmas, and conforms to the Fieler "Faster" theory that Mickey Kaus has so effectively championed.

Close Calls Department - I was glad Bork lost at the time. Admittedly, I was a partisan Democrat back then. And admittedly he was the object of a partisan witch hunt. But he's gone to considerable effort to keep me glad they fitted him for the dunking stool. OpinionJournal's "Best [Neocon-Approved Items] of the Web," offers the following bit of classic Bork, from NRO: ""If there is a problem with Bush's order, it is the exemption of U.S. citizens from trials before military tribunals. . . . The trial of American terrorists in criminal court would pose all the problems of trying foreign terrorists there."

Man, if there's one thing you don't want to have to deal with, it's "problems" trying people. Meanwhile, as Ginger Stampley hints, the problem is that the point of a "trial" is to establish whether someone is a terrorist in the first place.

Good News, Bad News - I have a cold. (Boo!) So I'm taking NyQuil. (Yay!) Dennis Leary's famous NyQuil rant is on this page. You just have to hit Page Down a couple of times.

A Motto - Never confuse politics with "current events."

New Link - A chick who would surely blanch at dissing her husband to the media, writer Wendy McElroy, edits the website ifeminists.com. I'm a longtime fan of McElroy, having discovered her writing in the pages of Liberty (Motto: Print Magazines Don't Need Dynamic Websites) and enjoyed her book, XXX.

Gender Gap - The Post Style section has a chin-puller by Paul Farhi about "The Great Worry Divide." Women are more emotional in the face of the recent terror attacks, more prone to worry and depression, men more analytical, distanced; if they have an emotion, it is anger rather than sadness. As is usual in such pieces, actual men and women provide strikingly corroborative testimony, buttressed by thesis-supporting quotes from social scientists. But when Mrs. Offering and I discussed it, we noticed a disparity that Farhi passes by: On the evidience of the article, women are much more willing to criticise their spouses to a reporter for newspaper publication than men are. Unqualified Offerings does not want to overgeneralize. These sorts of articles tend to choose their sample from friends of friends of the writer. So it's more judicious to say that the kinds of chicks who end up in the social circles where they know someone who knows someone in media and policy circles are more willing to criticise their husbands for the benefit of strrgners than their (can we say -whipped on this blog?) husbands are to criticise them. Only Usual-Suspect-in-stories-like-this Deborah Tannen has a kind word for these fellows and their ways of dealing with things. For its part, Unqualified Offerings last found itself suffering spontaneous upwellings of tearful grief for the September dead about a month after their murders. Call UO a girly-man.

More Chapman on Iraq - This from his regular venue in the Chicago Tribune:

Take a people tired of being tyrannized, add an opposition force determined to overthrow the government, blend with a handful of B-52s, bake for a few weeks, and there you have it--victory. The United States used this recipe with startling results in Afghanistan, and a cadre of hawks insists it will work just as well in Iraq.

Their reasoning is like saying that if you can cook yourself breakfast, you would have no trouble making Thanksgiving dinner for 30.

Dear Prudence - Steve Chapman's article today in Slate makes a compelling case against the arguments of the National Greatness crowd for attacking Iraq. To the argument that Saddam is a psycho and he might do anything, anything - which is to say, that deterrence wouldn't work - Chapman points out that deterrence has worked on Saddam:

When he was fighting U.S. forces a decade ago, he left his chemical and biological weapons on the shelf even as he was enduring a humiliating defeat.

Why? Because the first Bush administration communicated to Iraq in unmistakable terms that it would retaliate with nuclear weapons. In other words, Saddam was deterred—much as the Soviet Union was deterred for the entire length of the Cold War. Given his record, there is no reason to believe he would use the bomb if he had it.

But wait! There's more!

Hawks think the only possible reason he would want them is to use them offensively. But even a peaceably inclined Iraqi government might feel a strong urge to follow the same course, purely as a matter of self-preservation—much as China did in the 1960s. After all, Iraq is bordered on the east by its old enemy, Iran, with which it fought a debilitating war in the 1980s and which is suspected of having nuclear ambitions of its own. To the west lies Israel, a nuclear power that launched a pre-emptive airstrike against Iraq in 1981, pulverizing a nuclear reactor before it came online. Possessing nuclear weapons wouldn't enable Iraq to agress against nuclear-armed neighbors with impunity. But it would give Baghdad some assurance that it wouldn't be attacked.

At least eight countries have nuclear weapons, including those bosom pals Pakistan and India. Since 1946, more people have died from boxcutters than from nuclear attacks. Robert Kagan's "argument" (I use scare quotes because I'm not convinced Kagan really believes it) that "Saddam can covertly and deniably provide weapons, know-how or weapons material to terrorists like bin Laden or Son of bin Laden" fails to convince. Chapman points out that if a terrorist nuke went off, the list of possible sources would be pretty short, Iraq would be at the top of the list and just how deniable is such a thing anyway? The US has already made it clear in Afghanistan that, when it comes to attacks on American soil, the country will not play Perry Mason rules. The risks to Saddam of actually attacking the US, covertly or otherwise, with "weapons of mass destruction" (or, in the case of anthrax, widely scattered destruction) are huge. Chapman takes deterrence logic even further:

In fact, there is only one situation in which it would make sense for Saddam to use any weapons of mass destruction he may possess: an American-led attack with the clear intent of eliminating his regime once and for all. If the U.S. Army were rolling into Baghdad, he would have nothing to lose by unleashing all the havoc he can muster—which, as the hawks have been telling us, could be considerable. If they get their way in dealing with Saddam, they may also realize their worst fears.

Here I think he goes wrong in one important way. I think the hawks fear not having more war more than they fear further attacks on the US. Call me cynical. But if there is one flaw with Chapman's article, it's that he buries the lead:

Absent proof that [Saddam] is bent on sponsoring or carrying out acts of terror against Americans, it's hard to see why we should be any more worried about Iraq today than we were Sept. 10.

The thing is, the Usual Suspects wanted war with Iraq (Iran, Syria, Lebanon, "parts of Egypt, China, Russia, someone) well before the September massacres. With Iraq it was "finish the job." We had to be prepared for conflicts with "resurgent Russia," and the arrogant Chinese. War and preparations for War are a tonic for the National Greatness types, and what the tonic cures is the shallow, materialistic, satisfied decadence that David Brooks and Anna Quindlen alike abhor, and that any sane person would take back in a minute if they could, along with the lives of our 4,000 murdered countrymen, and "National Greatness" be damned.

Well, That's Settled... Admiral R. James Woolsey writes in yesterday's post against the longstanding policy of propping up autocratic regimes in the Arab world:

This ought to be enough to make us call into question some of the European-generated "truths" about another region, the Mideast, that have generally guided our conduct there for the past 80 years: that Arabs and Muslims have no aptitude for democracy, that we are well-advised to stay in bed with corrupt rulers -- occasionally changing them if they seem to threaten, especially, our access to oil -- and that the general rule should be: better the devil we know than the devil we don't.

We have, on the whole, followed this European conceptual lead, and it has brought us Sept. 11, disdain and hatred. Only in Afghanistan, and in Iran, where we are perceived to be at odds with the repressive regime, do the demonstrating crowds chant "U-S-A."

So, if I read this right, Woolsey identifies the policy as a causal factor in the September massacres. And since those corrupt rulers are overseas, that policy would be a foreign policy. And since it's the policy of our government, that would make it US foreign policy. Which means that Woolsey is saying that the September massacres were, among other things, outcomes of US foreign policy. Woolsey is a fan of expanding the war, so you won't see Michael Kelly and Charles Krauthammer denouncing him, but here he's saying something the doves on the left and isolationists on the right have said.

Early Adopters Profit! from eerily-prescient Unqualified Offering items! Opinion Journal's "Best [Neocon Approved Items] of the Web" links to this NYT piece reporting that "Saudis Balk at U.S. Request to Freeze Bank Accounts." Unqualified Offerings first reported this as pre-news on October 31st, the day the USA Today reported that the Saudis would "freeze terrorist assets." Surely investors numbering in the high-single digits are glad they got the word ahead of time!

Ginger Stampley Says "Ashcroft has been nothing but a disaster as AG on issues cutting across the ideological spectrum" and she's right. It is small consolation that he follows one of the worst attorney generals of all time. It's small consolation that most attorney generals, as George Will would say, suck ass. Ed Meese, John Mitchell, Bobby Kennedy. It's only if you can't remember their names that you're probably dealing with an okay fellow. (I make an exception for Richard Thornburgh, because he graduated from my high school, and we both spoke at my graduation. He is my attorney general homeboy!) I don't recall Carter Administration AG Benjamin Civiletti launching any no-knock raids. Past that, you have a group of mostly frightening men and women.

I actually had a little hope for Ashcroft, who seemed good on the Second Amendment and federalism going into the job, and maybe not so bad on freedom of speech, but those small hopes have been dashed. Republicans were put on earth to disappoint libertarians. I'm as big on the Second Amendment as any non-gun owner, but dammit, there are nine others in the Bill of Rights too. As for federalism, Ashcroft's doings in California (medical marijuana raids) and Oregon (the so-called right to die) put paid to that idea.

Business Idea - As libertarian Alan Bock says of himself, I too have always been better at the theory than the practice of capitalism. But that could change! Prominent among the spam I've been getting are come-ons for penis enlargement. Almost as numerous are ads for mortgage refinancing. So it hit me: Why not one company that does both? One unsolicited e-mail! One easy-to-read bill! Think of the promotional possibilities: "We'll take those extra points off your mortgage rate and add them directly to your - nudge nudge - bottom line!"

Some might object that nobody would understand both the schwantz-magnifying and payment-reducing sides of the business. My proposal is to staff the company exclusively with telecom people, who are used to not knowing what they're doing.

A Fanboy's Notes - I am by no means sold on the new Justice League cartoon series yet. But there was an amusing bit in tonight's episode. Green Lantern is on trial on a distant planet for allegedly destroying its neighbor, standing before a panel consisting of what appear to be the images of three AIs on a giant screen. The Flash objects to the proceedings because there is no one speaking before the court for the accused.

Flash: Don't you have lawyers here?
AI Judge: We solved our lawyer problem long ago.

"The Scandal Is What's Legal," Michael Kinsley famously said. Last night I talked on the phone to an old friend of mine in the national security bureaucracy. Eventually the topic came around the the War, and the "What now?" question. Anent the possibility of war with Iraq (not to mention "Iran, Syria, Lebanon, and 'parts of Egypt' ") he adverted to the source of any uncertainty - no one can know, he said, because the ultimate decision is going to be made by "one man."

Folks, this is nuts. I realize that we've been allowing Presidents to get us into wars on their own say so for some number of generations now. And I realize that "Gulf of Tonkin Resolution II," passed in late September, technically authorizes the President to attack Diemos and Phobos if he feels like it - he just has to claim that terrorists are using them for low-gravity training. But as Kinsley said, that doesn't mean it's not a scandal that "one man" decides whether to take an ostensible republic to war.

While I didn't vote for him, I always thought Dubya seemed like a substantially decent guy, less corrupt than Clinton and less megalomaniacal than Gore. My concern is that, because of that perceived decency, we are less concerned about heaping powers on the Presidency than we should be. John Ashcroft has been bad enough. I shudder to think what the next Janet Reno will do with the "USA Quote Patriot Unquote Act" behind her. We have to demand that Congress do its job and deliberate further wars in advance. Another good idea is to vote against everyone who voted for passage of the Patriot Act no matter what you think of their other merits. (Note: The preceding sentence may qualify as political advocacy and require Unqualified Offerings to fill out FEC forms at some point. That too, is a scandal.)

Highclearing.com Pre-IPO - Despite frequent cracks about our "many loyal reader" (sic), recent reviews of server statistics lead management to believe that Unqualified Offerings' readership may actually be, according to our source, "in the high one-figure range." The editorial staff would like to thank our early adopters.

Even For An Opinion Slut Like Me I couldn't work up the energy to dismantle Barbara Kingsolver's stupid op-ed in yesterday's Washington Post. Or Friday's Post - I'm repressing. In it, Kingsolver compares the most appealing things (to a liberal) that Franklin Roosevelt said in one speech to the least appealing things (to a liberal) George W. has done. And, as with so many well-off lefties who have written about the war, to pine for privation - these people seem to really resent the fact that Dubya hasn't restricted the country to a single cup of coffee a day yet, like FDR did. However, warhawk Matt Welch did work up the energy, and his treatment of Kingsolver is amusing.

The Words Are the Same But the Tune Is Different - Two potted histories of civilian casualties in warfare, one by blogger Steven den Beste and one by paleocon historian Joseph Stromberg. For den Beste, the special status of civilians was a brief sentimentality of history that needs to be put aside. Stromberg doesn't think so. I'm with Stromberg, but you can read den Beste's essay and Stromberg's essay and decide for yourself.