Split-Screen Republicanism Watch
We do the national greatness stuff abroad and the leave us alone stuff at home.
Andrew Sullivan

On February 8, President Bush told the Cattle Industry Convention and Trade Show he wants Congress to pass a $73.5 billion farm bill. (Link via A Coyote at the Dog Show.)

Healthwatch - National Review Online runs an article by Kathryn Jean Lopez warning that condoms are less than perfectly reliable at stopping the transmission of STDs. On the basis of these findings, an unsigned NRO companion piece urges the nation's young people, in the strongest possible terms, to "restrict their sexual activity to rim jobs and tit fucking."

Ragged Old Flag - Unqualified Offerings watched the Opening Ceremonies, probably the only part of the Olympics that it will watch. I wanted to see the WTC flag. It and the Star-Spangled Banner rendition were very moving, and it was nice that the announcers were mostly able to shut up for the duration. I had apparently misunderstood though - I thought that the US Olympic team was going to carry the WTC flag in the parade. That would have been better, the difference between "bloody but unbowed" and just bloody. I love my country a lot more than I love my flag, but flags have their uses; chief among them is use itself. Those firemen at the awful scene knew that the most important need touching that flag was to put it to work. Immediately.

One of the things I've done since September 11 is reconsider the national anthem itself. It is a greater work than I appreciated. Note that Key does not glory that the flag in Baltimore Harbor has been preserved for special occasions. He exults in the fact that it "yet waves."

Now That You Mention It - Andrew Sullivan can no more drop the Paul Krugman story than Democrats can lay off the Enron. Today he thunders,

The point is and was that Krugman sees and saw nothing wrong with feeding at the corporate trough for doing next to nothing.

This sounds very much like my vision of the ideal job. I only regret the impracticality of putting "feed at the corporate trough for doing next to nothing" on the Objective line of my resume.

I could get a lot of weblogging done with a job like that.

Poppy's Way - Sometimes I have a hard time staying awake through David Ignatius' columns, but his latest has some interesting ideas about dealing with "the Axis of Evil." He does a useful compare and contrast with Bush's anti-Mullah rhetoric when discussing Iran and Reagan's "evil empire" speech at the beginning of the end of the Cold War. First he discusses the impact of Reagan's coinage within the USSR itself:

[Ignatius's Russian host] turned to me, an American visitor, and said something I have never forgotten: "How can it be," he wondered, "that the United States has elected a president who dares to tell the truth about the Soviet Union? We thought that America, with all its money, had become decadent. But now you have called us by our true name."

I never looked at Reagan in quite the same way after that. In the very naivete of his comment, he had broken through a barrier. He had given ordinary Russians and East Europeans hope that communism would not be a permanent condition. The "Evil Empire" was gone within less than a decade.

Ignatius notes that people within and outside the Bush Administration believe that the Islamic Republic of Iran finds itself in a similarly pre-revolutionary state, with some evidence, and writes:

The Bush argument is that it makes no more sense to ally with a halfway reformer such as Iranian President Mohammed Khatami than it would have to embrace Yuri Andropov when Soviet reform efforts were beginning in the early 1980s. Better to encourage the true revolutionaries.

The practical problem with this argument is that it's dangerous -- both for the Iranian revolutionaries and for the United States. What coaxed Soviet communism toward its eventual collapse was a combination of carrots and sticks. The United States nurtured Soviet dissidents in part by keeping the doors open. Even Reagan continued to do business with the Communists in Moscow -- discussing a sweeping arms-control agreement at Reykjavik, Iceland.

I think the most effective lesson for managing the collapse of the Iranian mullahs comes one administration further along, Dubya's Dad's. I had no use for the man at the time, I was pleased to vote against him twice and would cheerfully have kept doing so. Once on 17th Street NW, I threw his motorcade the finger on my way to work - it was around the time James Baker's post-Tienanmen trip to Beijing first made the news. And Bush drove all of us loyal New Republic readers nuts during 1989 by utterly failing to rise to the rhetorical occasion of all the ferment in the Warsaw Pact. Half Europe demanded freedom, the Soviets stood revealed as exhausted and unwanted colonialists, and tongue-tied Poppy spoke barely a word of encouragement. He treated Gorbachev as if he mattered and the Soviet Union as if it were a going concern. He could not have seemed more out of touch.

He knew exactly what he was doing.

What he was doing (with John Major's help) was making artfully sure that Soviet reactionaries had nothing resembling an excuse to claim "Western interference" and that Soviet moderates had no reason to fear it. All the while allowing events to spin out of Russia's control. As bitter leftist Elvis Costello recognized in the aftermath of the Soviet breakup, "It wasn't an accident it wasn't a mystery / it was calculated and the rest is history." Except Costello made it sound like it was a bad thing.

Dubya has been careful to avoid his father's mistakes. "I will avoid my father's mistakes" might be practically the whole of his program. But when your dad gets it right, your dad gets it right. Iran has ripened into pre-revolutionary ferment with no substantial US covert or overt effort. The average Iranian, not having seen an American diplomat, soldier or spy for two decades must think that Mullahs ranting on about the Great Satan are, like, so twenty minutes ago. There is nothing remotely resembling a pretext for Iranian reactionaries to blame the country's troubles on the United States. That's a weapon I'm loath to give up.

Booknotes: Ignatius's first and least tedious novel, Agent of Innocence, is damned near indispensible to understanding the present moment. And hey, I hear Warrior Politics is out of stock anyway. So you need something else to read.

What's In a War - Good Michael Kinsley column today in which, among other things, he provides a useful working definition of what remains a slippery term:

As this column and other nit-pickers have noted before, terrorism is a squishy concept. But if the word means anything at all, it embodies the concept that even in war, the end can't justify the means. Terrorism is something or other that is bad even when used by the good guys in a good cause. It is a tactic or weapon that is inherently immoral.

Kinsley also tackles the "mission creep" problem.

Wilderness of Mirrors - The Matt Welch Region - Matt Welch proves he is no slouch at either conspiratorial speculation or segues in this item.

Gamesmanship - Andrew Hofer has a useful piece on More Than Zero today about the difference between using an analytical tool and making a moral judgment, partly in response to Justin Raimondo, and partly in response to Thomas Nephew, from whom one just can not escape these days. I still think there is a large factual question at stake. Hofer's analysis of the State of the Union address seems to rest on the assumption that Bush's rhetoric is meant to have a deterrent effect by threatening to widen the war. The neocon crowd believes that Bush's rhetoric heralds widening the war in fact. Both sides can't be right.

Divine Wind and Divine Afflatus - Richard Cohen's piece about suicide bombers and the Japanese kamikaze program has drawn a lot of praise. The part about the kamikaze is problematic:

These kamikaze attacks were both effective and terrifying, but they were also a clear sign that Japan had gone nuts.

The kamikaze attacks were an important element in the dehumanizing of Japan. They encouraged, maybe the right word is "permitted," the use of the atomic bomb. After all, the enemy was not rational. It was barbaric. It would never surrender. It would fight to the last square inch. Better to incinerate them all.

Unqualified Offerings commends to Richard Cohen's attention Gerhard Weinberg's m-word* history of World War II, A World at Arms. Weinberg's book militantly avoids apologetics for the conduct of the Axis Powers. (Warbloggers will also enjoy his treatment of the French.) For instance, Andy Kashdan might profit by Weinberg's discussion of the decision to drop the atomic bomb. But he takes pains to point out the rationality and military effectiveness of the kamikaze program.

The Japanese reached the point where they lost pilots more quickly than they could train even minimally competent replacements. What's more, American anti-aircraft measures had become so effective that the likelihood of a Japanese pilot dying on his first mission approached certainty. In other words, any mission became a suicide mission. Turning the planes themselves into bombs was a way of making them effective suicide missions. And I believe they were able to make suicide planes more quickly and cheaply too.

Now you can say that the Japanese should have known the war was lost by then, and surrendered rather than take that fearsome step. Hell, argue that they shouldn't have started it in the first place and I'll agree with you. So will Weinberg. But every country has its "If we're in it, we've got to win it" McCains to bear. The Japanese could hope that a stiff enough defense might convince the US to drop the demand for "unconditional surrender." It didn't work, but it might have.

You can argue that the government was ruthless to foster a dynamic in which young men volunteered to fly to their deaths, and that the young men themselves were crazed. The first part is true enough, but States have historically found insanity at least as useful as sanity in wartime. The second may be true. But military life through peace and war is a continuum of risk that starts at "someone could get hurt doing that" and does not stop short of the knowing walk to your own death. The deliberate decision to "take a few of them with me" leads to posthumous medals in this country too. Read the encounters between Young Jim and the kamikaze pilot in JG Ballard's great Empire of the Sun. Then lend your copy to Richard Cohen.

I hate Palestinian suicide bombers not because they make war, or because they sacrifice themselves in the process, but because they make squalid war, a war on dance clubs, pizza parlors, bus stops. On the people in them, that is. It's not as if the West Bank and Israel lack for military targets, but the suicide bombers are having none of it.

Nephew Notes - Over on Little Green Footballs, a discussion broke out about Thomas Nephew's piece on settlements and suicide bombers.The Newsracker smuggled my name into the discussion. What I can't help noticing is that his essential points went essentially unaddressed. At least not directly. Proprietor Charles Johnson writes

Most observers believe that the deal Barak offered Arafat at Camp David was, by far, the most generous deal the Palestinians are ever going to get; basically it gave them everything they wanted, except the "right of return" -- and Israel will never compromise on that.

Let's say that "most observers" are right, and not just most observers at Commentary either - that the Barak Plan really was the most generous deal the Palestinians are ever going to get. That doesn't make it generous as such. A "most generous" deal the Palestinians could ever hope for that includes perpetual Jewish settlements under Israeli jurisdiction, crisscrossed by roads which Arabs are forbidden to even use, among other impingements on sovereignty, hardly counts as everything the Palestinians wanted. The settlements constitute a principle of "the right of return for me, but not for thee." Unaddressed in the LGF discussion was Thomas Nephew's point that, since Oslo, the Israelis haven't just insisted on maintaining existing settlements - they built 20,000 more housing units. And who was in charge of that program? Why, for much of the time it was Housing Minister Ariel Sharon!

But it gets worse. Because here's another thing "most observers" believed and stated at the time: Barak could not have sold his plan to the Israeli parliament and electorate if Arafat had accepted it unmodified. The very authorities the hawkish bloggers revere, the Krauthammers and Pipeses and Kellys, excoriated Barak for offering as much as he did, and so did the Israeli right. People argue - actually, Unqualified Offerings is one of them - that Arafat should have made a counter-offer. But when we do that, we are saying he should have pushed Barak for more when Barak had already promised more than he could deliver.

I agree with TN: I don't think a Palestinian Charles Johnson or Stephen Den Beste would stand it for one second. I still blame the Palestinian leadership for the utterly self-destructive way they have pursued their conflict with Israel. There may not be a more murderously dysfunctional polity in the last half century. But while they may be their own worst enemies, they are not their only enemies.

Consider the Source - Everyone is dumping on Teddy Kennedy for this Super Bowl-related statement:

At a time when our entire country is banding together and facing down individualism, the Patriots set a wonderful example, showing us all what is possible when we work together, believe in each other, and sacrifice for the greater good.

Really, people should not be so quick to sneer. Teddy Kennedy has a lot of personal experience with "face-down individualism" after all. Also, sometimes even in the congressional record, typos and editing errors bedevil understanding. We know that the Kennedys have the common touch, that their struggles are our struggles, their dreams our dreams, their nightmares surely our own. I believe the Senator may believe that in those nightmares the entire country has to face drowned individuals.

Libertarianism and my Sister, The Continuing Series - Eve Tushnet wrote a long, thoughtful e-mail about "The Citizen or the Police" that raised some points worth expanding on. (Charles Dodgson has a rebuke to the same piece on his site, and he seems quite proud of it, but Eve was ahead of him in line, so it has to wait for another day.) I initially thought that Eve would put a public version of her response on her site and I would work from that, but instead this will be a "reader mail" piece.

Minor matter: Eve seized on a loophole that specifically related to my discussion of abortion. I closed that loophole here.

Her main argument, elaborated in telling detail, runs as follows:

First, I think the "what if it were my sister?" thought experiment is a great starting point to get people to question and re-evaluate the power of the state. It also appeals very strongly to my belief in family loyalty.

But it can't be more than a starting point, for two reasons. First, it relies on intuitions alone, and everybody's intuitions on this subject will differ. For example, I know people whom I _definitely_ wouldn't trust to turn in their sisters for theft, fraud, perjury, or, in some cases, anything short of child abuse. On the other hand, I _really really would_ want the abortionist who profited from my sister's (hypothetical) desperation to end up in jail. And I know lots of people would, despite their sorrow and compassion, really want their sister in jail for killing their unborn niece or nephew. There has to be some way of determining whose intuitions are right.

Second, intuitions are shaped to at least some extent by our culture and our moral beliefs, so political theory has to address what our intuitions _should_ be.

First, I agree that "What if my sister" is a starting point rather than an ending point. I consider that a feature, not a bug. I agree that people's intuitions on the matter will differ, and that there are people for whom blood ties utterly trump anything approaching ethics. This is a self-limiting problem so long as the first principle is followed. ("What if it were my sister?") Note that I am not an anarcho-capitalist and that the point of my original piece was not that compliance with all laws should be voluntary. People who would not agree their sisters should be punished for theft, fraud and perjury do not support laws punishing others for theft, fraud and perjury. If society has a preponderance of such people, it gets the fate it deserves - it collapses. Otherwise, the society has a preponderance of people who do accept that those are such bad things that even those near and dear to them should be accountable for violating those laws.

I get the impression that there are libertarians who desire to do away with politics altogether - put it this way: they write as if one could make politics go away. I don't think one can. Abortion is a perfect example of an issue that would vex even the night watchman state. Because the question of the personhood of a fetus is a moral question, not a political one. If the fetus is a person, or should be treated as one, then the state must defend its life from its mother even as the state must defend the born child's life from its mother or father. If the fetus is not a person, and must not be treated as one, then the state must not. Under the "my sister" principle, if you take the personhood of the fetus so strongly that you would

• jail your sister for having an abortion,
  
• jail your sister for performing an abortion,
  
• forcibly restrain your sister from obtaining an abortion, or
  
• forcibly restrain your sister from performing an abortion
  

then you should support laws criminalizing abortion. I wouldn't and I don't. I understand why others would. Dan Quayle flunked this test, so I can't take his moral standing seriously.

Naturally, if you think the state should destroy your sister's company for providing a free web browser with its software, and you are okay with the state whoring for other people's sisters' companies in the process, you should support antitrust laws too.

Elaborating on her second point, Eve continues

(...you can't shape people's intuitions to be perfect, of course--but we do need a standard of what it would mean to improve our intuitions.) It seems to me that what abortion is should be more important in shaping those intuitions than what we feel about it today. (Imagine asking a Roman Senator whether he thought his sister Messalina should be jailed for exposing their crippled son; or asking John Calhoun if his brother should be jailed for whipping a slave.)

More on this tomorrow, but the first thing to say is that it is an abomination to feel your brother should be allowed to whip a slave or even own one, but a worse one to feel that only your brother should be allowed to whip and own slaves.

Toward a Post-Blogger World - Unqualified Offerings has a working installation of Movable Type on its server, thanks to the timely help of Michael Croft and the support forum at movabletype.org. There's work to be done before converting the main site here to MT and off Blogger, particularly when it comes to the site template and importing the old entries. On the site template, Unqualified Offerings requires only that the site a) have narrow columns, b) be devoid of visual interest and c) be light green. Like now. On importing entries, and typing new ones, Ginger Stampley warns that

MT will barf on any entry where the 20th word is in, but doesn't close out, an HTML tag (e.g., a link, a quote, etc.). The import doesn't have a validator, but you can't tell.

You will get an error somewhere, normally when you generate the Categories pages, when you attempt to rebuild with an entry that meets this criterion. Use the excerpt tag to create a short excerpt to avoid this problem.

I'm not going with Blogger Pro because it still represents a single-point-of-failure outside my control (Pyra), and the price structure would have me paying about $6 extra per month at the rate I post. Blogger the phenomenon and Pyra the company remain a great force for good.

Movin' on Up - The Good News: I have an office for the first time, not a cube. The Bad News: a) They're not paying me anything more; b) When we consolidate floors I'll almost certainly lose it; c) I'm still in it! (But going home, finally.)

Geek Alert - For those who understand the true meaning of SOTU, Patrick Nielsen Hayden alerts the world to a cool link of whom all other cool links are but shadows.

Joys of Capitalism - All last week, ESPNRadio's Mike and Mike in the morning show broadcast from New Orleans, and for the last few days their guest was legendary chef Paul Prudhomme. On the last day, he spoke of starting out as a line cook, in what were apparenly expensive restaurants, in a moving way. I have to paraphrase:

When I was a line cook, I used to really concentrate on my work. I would tell myself, 'maybe this is for somebody's birthday, or anniversary. Maybe this is the only time they'll ever be able to afford to eat here,' and I would want the meal to be memorable for them. Coworkers would have to poke me if they wanted to snap me out of it.

The reminiscence doesn't just speak well of Prudhomme's decency, or his ability to "motivate himself." It speaks well of his understanding. There are people for whom fancy restaurants are a fact of their daily existence. There are others for whom they are yearly or even unique occasions, who saved their sheckels or shot the moon. Their meals have the tang of satisfaction (I earned it) or a nagging fiscal dread (I can't afford this).

We hear that things like Super Bowl attendance are "for the rich," and relatively few people could attend one on a whim. But if it's the most important thing in your life, you can save, or borrow, or cultivate connections. I could have gotten to one Super Bowl by now, if it were that important to me, and I've never been close to rich. The Hawaiian Honeymoon, the late-model pony car, dinner at the Palm. How badly do you want them? Capitalism constantly asks not just "What will you do?" but "What will you do instead of all the other things you could be doing?" In the wrong mood, one finds it not just an intimidating question but a damned nosey one. All costs are opportunity costs. Marxism probable had the appeal it did (and does), because it promised an end of questioning. Make bread in the morning, steel beams in the afternoon and go fishing in the evening, or whatever it was. Even "actually existing socialism" as it developed could silence The Question: by producing less bounty, it required one to forego fewer things.

Speaking of Football Trends - The AFC is on a minor Super Bowl hot streak, having won 4 of the last 5 Super Bowls. Three different teams collected those four trophies too. Back in the days of the famous NFC streak, suffering AFC fans spent a lot of time trying to explain or explain away their conference dropping 13 Super Bowls in a row. Was it simply 13 heads in a row on a coin, something the statisticians warn you can happen? Was it a coincidence that a handful of dynasties (Redskins, Cowboys, Giants, Niners) arose in quick succession in a single conference? Were NFC teams (gulp) really better, the way their fans and radio idiots claimed?

Around about year 13, I decided the streak was a phenomenon of path dependence. Even taking into account the handful of games that could have gone either way, 13 in a row is a trend. But the "superior conference" explanation didn't hold up either. During the streak there were years in which the NFC had an edge in the interconference record, years in which the AFC had the edge, and years of relative equality. (Each team plays four games a year against teams from the other conference. Tote up those wins and losses by conference and you can declare one "stronger" than the other, or both about equal.) But if you start with a working assumption that the best team in the league wins the Super Bowl, and that to be the best you have to beat the best, implications arise. NFC Team A beats AFC Team X this year's Super Bowl, so it's the best team in the league. Who will represent the NFC in next year's Super Bowl? Either Team A or a team that can beat Team A. Who will represent the AFC? Either Team X (best in conference) or a team that can beat Team X. But our simplifying assumption was that Team A is better than Team X, because it won. So being able to claw your way past Team X does not imply that you are necessarily up to the challenge of Team A-level football. Either being Team A or beating Team A does. Once you have a champion come out of a conference, you have a competitive bunch of coaches and general managers spending thirteen hours a day figuring out how to get past the champion. Meanwhile, in the other conference, the staff has to spend all that time figuring out how to get past the team that lost anyway.

At this point, the site's younger readers must feel like Steven den Beste reading Justin Raimondo. This man is making no sense! they cry. You're lucky if you even make the playoffs the year after you win the Super Bowl.

Yes, children, that is true - these days. But it was not always so. Only since the salary cap came do teams auto-destruct with the regularity we grown used to. (Yes, free agency plays a role, but the salary cap has much more impact on team stability than free agency alone would.) It used to be you had to actually become good enough to take advantage of your rival's slight decline.It was Jack London's NFL then. Also, nobody rode Segways. But then, nobody rides them now either.

The thing about the path dependence theory is that it implies that once a team from the out conference finally breaks through, it should become the foundation for a new streak. Now path dependence favors the former outs. That sort of looks like it may be happening, with the AFC's 4-1 run the last five years. You would think the effects of path dependence would decline in an era that rapidly churns champions, though.

Two Is a Trend? - They say that defense wins championships and, until very recently, they have been wrong, at least when it comes to the NFL. Go back a couple of years:

2000 Saint Louis Rams
1998-1999 Denver Broncos
1997 Green Bay Packers
1996 Dallas Cowboys
1995 San Francisco 49ers
1993-1994 Dallas Cowboys
1992 Washington Redskins
1991 New York Giants

Let's redo the preceding as a list of quarterbacks:

2000 Kurt Warner
1998-1999 John Elway
1997 Brett Favre
1996 Troy Aikman
1995 Steve Young
1993-1994 Troy Aikman
1992 Mark Rypien
1991 Jeff Hostetler

The trend is pretty clear: Great offense and a top-notch quarterback plus a solid but not necessarily spectacular defense wins championships. You have to go back to 1991 to find a real defense-wins-championships Super Bowl outcome, and really, back to 1991 to find a so-so guarterback winning. (Don't tell me about Mark Rypien. For that one year, he walked on air.) "They say" a lot of nonsense mostly. Even when you go back far enough to take in the 1985 Bears and the 1970s Steelers, teams noted primarily for their defense make up a minority of NFL champions.

Until the 21st Century.

The 2001 champs, the Baltimore Corporate Welfare Queens, had a murderous (as it were) defense and a simply competent offense. They actually won the Super Bowl the way idiots on the radio spend all season telling you how Super Bowls are won, right up until the time some marquee passer slaloms his finely-tuned scoring engine past the other contenders. I thought it was a fluke. I thought God wanted to humble Unqualified Offerings by showing it that Statism Pays if He wants it to. And Unqualified Offerings didn't even exist yet!

You get into teleological problems anyway trying to say "offense won" this game or "defense won" that game. Both teams put both kinds of units on the field. Take Super Bowl 34 - ahem, Super Bowl XXXIV: St. Louis 23, Tennessee 16. It was the lowest combined points total for a Super Bowl in five years, and the lowest winning score in nine. Did "defense win" that game, because the score was low, and because the final play was the famous tackle-on-the-one? Or did offense lose the game because Tennessee just didn't have enough pop to put the ball across the goal line when it needed to? Or did offense win the game because you can keep a great offense like the Rams down for awhile, but sooner or later they will have their moments (as they did last night). The winning score was along touchdown pass, hardly what one thinks of when imagining ways in which "defense wins championships."

Even I would say that defense won the championship in last night's Super Bowl.

That's two in a row. Accident? Coincidence? Conspiracy? Too soon to tell, of course!

You've Got Mail - Virginia Warren (aka "Air Force Virginia") writes, anent "The Citizen or the Police,"

If people want to live under a know-it-all authoritarian regime their whole lives, why don't they just live with their parents? At least your parents love you; the State can't.

She has some other interesting remarks to be incorporated into the too-long promised follow-up to the original piece.

Jeremy Lott writes to point out his new Reason article with a paradoxical sub-hed: "Burning Sensations: How would-be censors promote free speech." Check it out.

"Damaged Justice" writes to admit that Netscape is evil, evil, but also to put in a good word for Mozilla:

The upshot? Netscape will continue to suck -- it'll just crash less. If you want a *real* alternative, give the latest Mozilla milestone a go. I still keep IE around for emergencies, but they're few and far between.

Damaged Justice is (not so) secretly also named Ian Rowan, and he has a weblog named "Music for Misanthropes."

And Ginger Stampley writes to point out that one of Gene Wolfe's publishers has happened upon, and praised, Unqualified Offerings' standard "The Vodalus Approach" (link at left in the "best of..." section) in his fine weblog, Electrolyte. How cool is that? The author also praises Ginger's blog, as well he should.

Another Way Of Looking At It - Virginia Postrel and Andrew Hofer think Bush's State of the Union address makes strategic sense because it amplifies our threat power. I wish I could convince myself that they were right, but you can read Andrew's argument and Virginia's commentary on it and decide for yourself.

Halftime - First crucial test passed: No lip-synching, no instrument-miming. Huzzah. Unqualified Offerings is a softie and teared up during "Where the Streets Have No Name," as the long list of the dead scrolled past. But it might have been less ambivalently moved if a) Bono had mugged less; and b) he looked less like Bill Maher wearing ski goggles.

The Dog Ate My Eerie Prescience - Unqualified Offerings' prediction that New England would upset Saint Louis was, um, eaten by Blogger! That's it! Would a site that constantly refers to itself in the third person lie to you?

An Actually Super Bowl - Wow. That was a game. And everyone's been too polite to mention that there were two seconds left on the clock after Vinatieri's field goal.

Interesting synchronicity: For years the conventional wisdom was that the only reason to watch the Super Bowl is for the ads. Now a year in which the ads were nothing special, but the game is.

Actually, three of the last five Super Bowls have come down to the final drive, and the two before that - Green Bay-New England and Pittsburgh-Dallas - were competitive going into the fourth quarter. So as the NFL regular season gets worse, the postseason gets better.

Pick-a-Header Dept. This can go under "The Media Really Does Suck" or "Split-Screen Republicanism Watch" as suits you. Apparently the Bush budget proposal will include at least some cuts in discretionary domestic spending. The Washington Post news headline? "Bush Budget About to Show Its Darker Side." I can't help but think that if you got the editors in a room and tried to explain how biased the wording was, they'd profess themselves completely unable to see it that way. More loaded language, from the article itself:

This [highway program] budget mechanism, called the Revenue Aligned Budget Authority (RABA) formula, works well in an expanding economy but results in a large cut when the economy slows.

So if spending drops, it means the formula doesn't "work well?" O you Keynesians, you will say you want to "prime the pump" in slack times. But tell me that, if the formula were structured so that spending declines in expanding economies the Post wouldn't be telling us that it "works well in a recession but results in a large cut during boom times." Now tell me with a straight face.

The U.S. Conference of Mayors wrote the White House and Labor Secretary Elaine L. Chao last week protesting a proposal to eviscerate spending for a youth job training program, from $225 million this year to $45 million next year.

There's a great newspaper-of-record type word: eviscerate!

Now then, we do the media really does suck stuff at the beginning and the split-screen Republicanism watch stuff at the end. According to the article, the budget will be two treeel-lion dollars big. Doctor Evil doesn't have a pinky adequate to the task of saying that number aloud.

Administration officials have said that government spending other than for Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid is expected to grow by 9 percent next year, compared with the 4 percent growth this year. But when defense, homeland security and the economic stimulus are set aside, the spending increase drops to 3 percent, or barely more than the rate of inflation.

Which means that even when you set aside even the flimsiest excuses for spending increase (economic stimulus) and continue to treat 1930s-era programs like Delhi cattle, when you set aside all parts of the budget deemed untouchable, spending on the supposedly touchable parts of the budget still goes up. Before negotiations, compromoises, compromises, continuing resolutions and so-called emergency bills.

Whee.

What He Said - Maybe someone would listen to blood'n'guts Pournelle, if no one else?

I fear the new war. It is well intentioned, but there is no way out as we are conducting it. Our goals are not to make ourselves feared, or be left alone, but to put the world right. We can't do that, but we have enough power to try.

Let me say it again: our goal ought to be to make certain that the ruling class in every nation understands that it is very much to their interest to avoid having their territories used as places to conspire against the United States, to launch attacks on the United States, or even to learn how to attack the United States.

There are regimes which have already violated this rule. They should be brought down, in blood, with their rulers hounded off the face of the earth. I'll go further and say that we ought to establish monuments, visible monuments, in their capitals as reminders. Then we come home.

We aren't good at running the world. The Brits were at one time but they have lost heart. They don't have any ruling class to export. There's no one capable of putting the world right. What we can do is be ourselves.

"We are the friends of liberty everywhere, but we are the guardians only of our own." Guarding our own can require overseas interventions. It shouldn't require an empire.