TardyPundit - Believe it or not, political commentators have been discussing Middle Eastern policy on the net. No, really! Would a site that constantly refers to itself in the third person lie to you? They have! Unqualified Offerings has owed Steven Postrel and the world a cleanup post from the "Scorpions and Undershorts" series - as it has been reminded publically - and hopes to get to it tomorrow. Today it did family things.

Cliche Watch - Unqualified Headquarters has a computer savvy kid, but the adults have traditionally held their own. However, let the record show that it was Offering Boy who figured out how to exit the Spiderman game for the PC. It was not a code problem, just - and Unqualified Offerings insists on this - confusing menus. That problem solved, UO amends its earlier comments on the game as follows: this site now recommends it unreservedly. It plays just like you were, well, Spiderman. If you buy only one game this year on the recommendation of a libertarian isolationist blogger, make it this game.

Joys of Capitalism - Freshwater Division - Three bass and a trout in an hour at Seneca Creek today downstream of MD 28. If you can find a better spring lure than a suspending Rapala in the Baby Bass pattern - buy it! (And tell Unqualified Offerings what you bought.)

Blink And You'll Miss Something - Apparently, this site was down for five minutes this afternoon:

At approximately 4:40pm EDT (20:00 UTC) our network systems indicated a loss of internet connectivity. This resulted in approximately 5 minutes of downtime. As of 4:45pm EDT (20:05 UTC) all systems resumed normal operations. We apologize for this brief service interruption.

Unqualified Offerings apologizes to the two or even three people that may have been trying to log on at that time.

Present at the Creation - Bruce Baugh, mentioned in one of the Nobilis items below, has taken the plunge and started a weblog of his own.

Appeasement Watch - The link imperialists at Airstrip One are trying to blackmail this site. "Reciprocal" links, they say, so long as UO makes the first move. Well sure, that's how it starts. Then pretty soon they have Unqualified Offerings announcing Saint George's Day celebrations and next thing you know we're changing our name to "A Libertarian Reads Hello." (Kyle MacLachlan's bride looks pretty hot!)

Unqualified Offerings will make its link decisions on its own timetable in the national interest. It is considering its options, linkwise, and will take such steps as are consistent with and enhance its security. It knows that giving in to terrorism only encourages further demands. Not that Airstrip One couldn't take confidence-building measures that would make the process more tangible, with specific dates, and with monitoring to ensure accountability and consequences for nonperformance.:

1) Airstrip One has improved greatly on the column width front. Now how about the larger font its loyal readers deserve?

2) Sandbaggers DVDs!

Has Unqualified Offerings ever mentioned the magnificence that was Sandbaggers? Thought not. Follow the link.

Before I'd Build a Wall I'd run a ton of op-eds about it. That diplomat and gasbag Dennis Ross finds grudgingly favorable things to say about unilateral disgorgement of Palestine by Israel ought, Unqualified Offerings supposes, to give it pause. But Ross is so darn reluctant, and so compelled to junk the idea up with diplomatic wedding cake - "we may want to work with the Israelis to make the withdrawal as practical as possible and to try to broker understandings between the Palestinians and Israelis to make the arrangements more stable and enduring. We may even consider the value of an international presence to fill in as the Israelis implement separation" - that UO is holding firm in its prescription. Ross manages to mix the sensible

While Israeli military operations have disrupted and destroyed much of the terrorist infrastructure in the West Bank, it is only a matter of time before it is reconstituted. It was neither technologically sophisticated nor expensive, and no shortage of recruits will come forward to replace the militants killed or arrested. The challenge therefore is to fashion a political strategy to transform the respite the Israeli military has provided into a more enduring reality. Can an international conference do that?

Not likely, as both sides will create conditions for it that tie up diplomacy but change nothing on the ground.

even the acute

As for Arafat, he will remain passive, waiting to be rescued by international intervention. In his mind, an imposed solution puts all the pressure on the Israelis and relieves him of the need to make a decision.

with the sort of inanity such people spend years learning in graduate school

If he cannot -- at this point a safe bet -- a second, more conventional, option exists: developing a timeline of mutual obligations. Only this time, in addition to security obligations, political negotiations and an agenda for the permanent-status talks would be integrated into the timeline with specific dates, and with monitoring to ensure accountability and consequences for nonperformance.

to the downright self-contradictory. Excerpt the first:

A state on 50 percent of the West Bank will not be acceptable even to those Palestinians who most want to live in peace with Israel.

Excerpt the second:

To make the political process more tangible, a Palestinian state within the 40 percent of the West Bank and the 60 percent of Gaza in which the Palestinians have at least theoretical responsibility today would be recognized on the timeline.

So 50 percent won't win 'em over, but 40 percent would. Gotcha.

A Libertarian Reads the Newspaper - and Gags - George Will cheerfully assures us that "The conservatism that defined itself in reaction against the New Deal -- minimal government conservatism -- is dead," and that the security of another country, one with nuclear weapons and the best army in its region, is the "largest issue" facing the United States today. But not to worry: in addition to a "largest issue," the country also has a "most momentous policy problem," which is pesky researchers trying to help us live longer, healthier happier lives, and Dubya is putting a stop to that. And we'll get school vouchers! Which will bring the nose of the regulatory camel under the private school tent, but never mind that.

Andy Kashdan, thou shouldst be living at this hour.

Shitty Little Countries - Unqualified Offerings meant to recommend Alan Furst's most recent novel, Kingdom of Shadows, the other month. It's probably Furst's best novel since Dark Star, which was the one that came out after his masterpiece, Night Soldiers. The hero of Kingdom of Shadows is a Hungarian playboy and spy, Nicky Morath, who lives in Paris on the eve of World War II. Nicky does jobs for his uncle at the embassy. Sometimes he even knows what they are. Nicky and his uncle are liberals in an illiberal time and patriots of a small country in a region big countries stride like elephants. That means that Nicky's uncle occasionally ends up doing favors for some of the nastier big countries. Once when Nicky complains, his uncle turns on him. Look at the map, he says angrily, and look at us. His point is that Hungary is not the master of its own destiny, and the task of its patriots is to be as decent as possible.

There is a kind of specifically American incomprehension. I like to think it's not just me. As the citizen of a large country, a powerful country, a country that has Done Things, I find myself amazed that someone from a country that is none of those things could have a passionate attachment to it. What's to love about Hungary? Costa Rica? Jordan? How could anyone get worked up about a shithole like Gaza? What have those places ever done anyway?

On a moment's reflection, it's obvious that people love the familiar, that love is anyway not about merit, that "merit," applied to nations, has its problematic aspects. One of the things that make's Furst's book so good is that he vivifies the patriotism of the citizen of the small country, and the limits on his sphere of political action.

Even at the time, this struck me as having everything to do with the contemporary situation(s) in the Middle East. David Bromwich had a good op-ed in the Post on Tuesday about what one might call Furstian limits in the Levant.

Suppose I am a Palestinian today in one of the camps. I live in the shadow of a well-known faction that is taken to represent me. I have reason to fear the members of this faction. Against them, I see nothing but an invading army reducing to rubble the entire structure of my society. How shall I speak and act? If, in the circumstances, I neither say nor do anything about terrorism, am I to be accounted morally identical with the most savage of the terrorists?

The deficiency of the Bush doctrine shows most starkly in its language. It relies, for every calibration of judgment, on just one word, evil. And indeed, someone who lures young people to acts of suicide and mass murder with the promise of a heavenly reward -- such a person is as evil as any creature that has walked on this earth. But what to make of the teenage recruit who, under pressure of plausible reasoning, decides that the bombings are well advised because things will mend in no other way? Such a person is deluded; what he or she does is wicked. Yet the seducer to wicked acts is surely worse than the person who commits them from despair.

What, then, of those who look on and say nothing? Such people are aware of the recruitment, and they may disapprove, but they do not risk their lives to stop it. These are ordinary people, with an ordinary mixture of weakness and self-protectiveness. Their prudence, their timidity, is not admirable, but they have been terribly pressed upon, and you cannot call them evil without dismissing at a single stroke a large portion of the human race. The ambiguity that is a condition of the lives of such people is denied by a doctrine that says those who are not with us are against us.

To my taste, Bromwich ends up praising the actual bombers with faint damnation. But the rest of his analysis is acute. And I'm down with his conclusion:

The fate of many nations depends on our ability to declare no more enemies than we have and to create no more enemies than we must.

Au Contraire - The Sequel - Will all of you people get off of Blogspot already? You're cramping my style! The purpose of this item is to link to an Airstrip One entry in which Emmanuel Goldstein argues that his antiwar.com colleague Justin Raimondo is far too sanguine about Jean-Marie LePen. But hey, all blogspot sights are experiencing their daily recess right now. So every now and then, log onto Airstrip One, which you should be doing anyway, and look for today's piece by Goldstein on LePen. (Airstrip One has multiple contributors.)

This Is More Like It - Small US special forces units are operating inside Pakistan near the Afghan border, with at least tacit permission of the Pakistani government. If this is what Dubya was holding out the textile duty reduction for, then, as the young people say, it's all good. But now is the time to drop those barriers then.

“I think there’s some confusion,” said Maj. Gen. Rashid Qureshi, whose nose grew visibly as he spoke. “What I’d heard earlier is that the only thing that may be happening is a communication link. I don’t think any Special Forces or Delta Force commandos are operating inside Pakistan.”

(Note: there may be a minor transcription error in this quote from the MSNBC.com story.)

The Prodigal Blogger - It looks like Diana Moon's resolve to cut back on Letter from Gotham or radically change its focus lasted...a couple of days. So if you stopped visiting Letter from Gotham, start again.

Au Contraire - If you wanted a contrarian view of Jean-Marie LePen, you knew that Justin Raimondo was your man. He includes a recent link to an interview with LePen by...Ha'aretz.

Oh come on, UO, quit pussy-footing around. Are you trying to say LePen isn't a xenophobe, an anti-semite and a neo-nazi, or not?

Answer: On the basis of the Ha'aretz interview, both what's said and what comes out around the edges, I think LePen is a crotchety old man with certain instincts that he has worked to master, not just for show but not entirely successfully. In some ways, LePen and Jews reminds me a bit of Senator Robert Byrd and blacks. The former Klansman has probably really tried to change his attitudes over the years, but occasionally the wrong thing slips out. Do I believe that LePen is more viscerally anti-Jewish than all too much of the European intelligentsia these days? (Gary Farber's Amygdala is an excellent source for the latest European outrages.) That would be a no.

There's Your Trouble - Unqualified Offerings has argued that Jewish settlements in the Occupied Territories make Israel less rather than more secure. Here's an interesting datum from today's Post, "Israel Tallies Results Of West Bank Offensive":

The army did little in Hebron, the seething home to what one analyst called "the heart of hard-core terrorists," largely because military planners concluded an operation there would endanger the Jewish settlers in the center of the city, according to sources.

Israeli dove Ran HaCohen, who says things that raise even UO's blood pressure sometimes, argues that the settlement policy amounts to making Jews in Israel proper less safe for the sake of Jews in the West Bank and Gaza.

Israel cares much more about its 200.000 settlers in the West Bank than about its 6 million citizens inside the Green Line (indeed, most settlements are surrounded by a fence).

Given that HaCohen has opposed Operation Defensive Wall in its entirety, it's ironic that the Sharon government's method of conducting the war tends to buttress his claim.

Collateral Damage - Reader Mike Jacobs e-mails to note a stomach-turning item in yesterday's Washington Post:

A 5-year-old Colombian girl traveling alone on a commercial flight from Bogota to New York last week was discovered carrying more than two pounds of heroin concealed in her luggage, according to U.S. Customs Service officials.

Although officials cited numerous cases of unaccompanied minors apprehended smuggling illegal drugs, they said Monday that this was believed to be by far the youngest child.

"Sending a 5-year-old girl alone on a plane to smuggle heroin represents a new low -- even for drug traffickers," said Joe Webber, the Customs special agent in charge for New York.

Down the Road Apiece - Dan Hartung of the dormant Lake Effect blog kindly writes to note that Japan formally gave up its claim to Sakhalin Island in 1951. Unqualified Offerings bets they were real happy to do it, too. He avers that they still lay claim islands at the southern end of the Kuriles chain near Hokkaido, where Russia has been observing "nine tenths of the law" since the end of WWII. He provides two links for readers interested in learning more about Japanese land claims, both from the Japanese Foreign Ministry website, one a history of the Northern Territories Issue and the other a map. Dan also notes that Japan "only controlled half of Sakhalin from 1905-1945."

The essential point remains that Russia bumps right up against Japan and postwar Japan had reasons to worry about Soviet designs on them.

That Was Then, This Is Now - Of the misguided ideas floating around punditspace, the biggest is the notion that there is a "secret plan" for Jordan to take over the West Bank. But surely the Grand-Strategy-by-Analogy of conquering "six or seven" Arab countries and transforming them, just like we did with Germany and Japan, into liberal democracies who also happen to love Israel has a grandiosity the other misguided ideas can't touch. Leave aside cultural differences. Leave aside the fact that the Arab countries have a tradition of terroristic resistance that Germany and Japan didn't have.

Folks, there's no Soviet Union any more! Why do you think the Germans and Japanese really put up with us? Because it could have been worse - a lot worse. The bear was at both the German and the Japanese doors. Hell, the bear was half in the house. The Russians had their paws on a good chunk of Germany for forty-five years and showed every readiness to scarf up the rest of it if they got the chance. The Russians are still on Sakhalin Island. There is simply no comparable bogeyman to scare an occupied people into cooperating now.

Science Fiction Is What I Am Pointing At When I Am Taxing Science Fiction - Electrolyte has another reason why they call Republicans "the Stupid Party," a congressional candidate who proposes funding the space program with a one percent tax on "fiction books, science fiction comic books, space sciences books and any other space-related literature" plus related "toys, puzzles and games."

Why stop there? Let's fund the elimination of the IRS marriage penalty with a tax on romance novels. Let's pay for the CIA with Tom Clancy user fees. We can run HUD with a surcharge on Bob Vila videos. The war on drugs will be paid for by moving ABC After School Specials to pay-per-view. And while we're at it, tax comic books and make me a superhero, dammit.

When Karma Spews - The guilty secret of parenthood, Unqualified Offerings believes, is this - mildly sick children are just adorable. They look so woebegone and put out with their Dondi eyes and their pouty widdle wips, and their often fractiously complex consciousnesses are reduced to a single, contiuous snuggle reflex.

But when they get real sick, they make you pay for finding such satisfaction in the suffering of others. Saturday night the Littlest Offering commenced hosting a stomach bug, which she has been doing her best to purge in traditional fashion. What is in normal times an entrance has become an exit. And the exit - it has set ambitious traffic targets for itself and is meeting them handily. Ahem. "Handily." Yuck.

This morning, Offering Boy began to express solidarity with his sister. Okay, not solid arity exactly.

Anyway, blog entries may be interrupted at any time.

You're Either With Ohio Or You're With The Terrorists - Kevin Holtsberry's site has the story on the Ohio state legislature resolution in support of Israel. No, Unqualified Offerings doesn't care either. Instead you should read his careful demolitions of today's claptrap from Jonah Goldberg.

Because Kevin's a lot nicer to Jonah Goldberg than Unqualified Offerings intends to be.

A Fanboy's Notes Redux - Unqualified Offerings mentioned the roleplaying game Nobilis the other night. If you used to play games when you were younger and gave it up, this one might just rope you back in. The publisher's official site, the designer's unofficial official site and Philippe Tromeur's fan site are great places to learn more about the game. There is also quite the Offering-like piece, "Understanding Nobilis," on my Nobilis website/weblog, "Thought Records."

Unqualified Offerings was surprised to get a nice e-mail re the previous Nobilis mention from Bruce Baugh, one of the giants of the RPG hobby and the editor of Nobilis' new edition. Thank you, Bruce.

Three is a Trend - The results are in! Webloggers named Jim love Spiderman. Jim Treacher e-mails to say that he figures the hardcore Spiderfans will dislike what the movie does to the story, but that those of us who have not been enmeshed in fandom for awhile should really enjoy it. What Unqualified Offerings wonders is, are there even "continuity cops" any more? Can there be? Near as UO can tell, the major comic book companies restart their official continuity every few years, and even Marvel, the House Continuity Built, seems pretty willing to resort to alternate timelines for the sake of a story these days. (viz. the superb Earth X.)

He also argues, persuasively, that in Unbreakable, Bruce Willis in the poncho was supposed to look like the Spectre. This makes perfect sense.

And Jim of Objectionable Content writes to share his own squib of Spiderman hype from the winter.

There Was a Loss of Essence - Blogger kept timing out last night. But it's a new day, with new Offerings to come.

Try Telling That To An Angry Mob - Unqualified Offerings intends to whip a crowd of supporters into a frenzy in front of the Washington Post building this weekend, then lead the crowd in a protest burning of today's paper. Why? Because UO didn't get mentioned in Howard Kurtz's article on political weblogs!

Not that this site is bitter.

Wilderness of Germs - A worker at Fort Detrick has tested positive for anthrax, says FoxNews.com. This is veddy interesting, since Fort Detrick figures heavily in the "domestic theory" scenarios that have gained evidentiary ground lately.

A Fanboy's Notes

1. Amazon.com has a Spiderman store in anticipation of the movie. Unqualified Offerings feels that its entire youth has been validated.
2. To digress momentarily on business matters - you'd think Amazon.com could have made a better Spiderman store. There is a ton of printed matter out just now - movie tie-in books, graphic novels, picture-free novels, histories, art books. There are soundtracks. There are videos of the old TV series. This is all the kind of stuff Amazon sells. But the "Spiderman store" displays only toys and a video game.
3. Speaking of video games, Unqualfied Offerings has obtained a copy of the PC version of Activision's Spiderman game. Plays great. That's important because, at least on the computer at Unqualified Headquarters, you never get to stop.Choosing "Exit to Main Menu" just dumps you back to the beginning of the level you're currently on.
4. Watched Unbreakable for the first time last night. (New DVD player, new TV. Time to christen.) Pretty amazing. The prologue in the early-60s department store was flawless, the way little glances and forms of address convey the racial tensions in the scene. There's the great shot toward the end, when the shadow of Willis' poncho hood falls across the bridge of his nose and down his cheeks in precisely the shape of a classic superhero's cowl. How long did they work on the lighting for that one? More to say sometime in an item with a spoiler warning.
5. Just two weeks to the Spiderman movie.
6. Soon, the new edition of Nobilis will be in stores.

What a great spring to be a geek!

Buy My Book! When It Exists... - Unqualified Offerings agrees with the Postrel-Willis thesis that one of the best reasons to start a weblog is to sell your book(s). Here are the books that Unqualified Offerings encourages you to buy, as soon as it gets around to writing them:

The Day of What We Both Said: Frost and Men and Women and Poetry - A consideration of gender relations in the poetry of Robert Frost, with special attention to "West-Running Brook;" "Two Witches;" "Home Burial;" "Maple;" and "The Housekeeper." The perspective of feminist theory is considered, but decentered, sharing space with sociobiology and libertarian economic analysis.

Another Man's Name: Paul M.A. Linebarger and Cordwainer Smith, His Life and Their Times - A "dual biography" of a single person (sort of), scholar/CIA titan Paul Linebarger and his pseudonym, classic science fiction author Cordwainer Smith. Something like the dust jacket for this book actually exists as the last half of a previous Offering.

Against Simplicity: Poems - This book actually exists. In manuscript form(s) anyway - publishers have so far found it resistible.

Note that Willis' suggestion that book sales are the "killer app" of weblogging (or is it really the other way around?) tends to strengthen the argument about the relation between blogging and old media writing/publishing propounded below and other places.

Blogwatch Beyond - What's "hot?": Crises of confidence; winnowing.

Where are the blogs of yesteryear? In the last month or so, the trend is previously-active bloggers cutting back on their posting levels, ceasing to update their sites or coming right out and announcing an intention to stop blogging or to radically recast their weblogs:

Sgt Stryker: Famously wrote "I think I've run out of shit to say" on April 16. Then went on to say the scary stuff:

Blogging's a flash in the pan. The better writers will get hired by traditional sources to write on the web or in print. More and more journalists will start up "blogs", and soon everyone else will hop on the bandwagon. Those blogs will be bland because they will want to have broad appeal. Most everyone else around right now will soon get bored, get jobs or get jiggy doing something else. Blogs as we know them will probably morph into something else and people will look back on these things like they do the old 'zines.

Since "giving up blogging," Stryker has posted 7 items, a perfectly respectable think-blog rate of 1.4 items a day. But the words linger.

Letter From Gotham - The selenously-pseudonymous Diana Moon announced Thursday that she was getting out of the warblog vocation, and intended to return her site to something like its original conception:

I had originally planned to write a blog devoted to one subject: New York City, post 9/11. And that's what I'm gonna go back to. A virtual version of Man With a Camera, so to speak. I will have fewer hits, but so what? And, as I said, I will continue to suggest articles to other bloggers without thought of a link or a mention, but because I think they should be read, or because I think it will help their blog.

Her stated reasons resonate with me, given what my own recent concentration on politics has meant for my productivity as a poet:

My real passion is music. Music takes not only physical dexterity, but a certain mindset, and that mindset is not the politically contentious one that this blog has made me focus on. When I come home I used to switch into music mode. Now I switch into "compose the post" mode. And since I can't have two obsessions, this has got to give. I have a recital coming up and I find in the middle of a piece that something Robert Fisk wrote intrudes. Not good.

Remember that word: obsession...

Newsrack - Blogfests kill! Thomas Nephew's last post dates from March 19, a recap of the Mid-Atlantic Blogfest I symposium on drug legalization. Mid-Atlantic Blogfest itself was Marhc 16. Actually, Blogfest itself is probably innocent of the slumber of Newsrack. I believe the culprit to be the tyrant, real life.

A Libertarian Reads the Paper - Andy Kashdan announced Thursday that

I've decided to close down the printing press. I'll spare you the reflections on the blogger medium, or at least a long version of it. Although perhaps I can occasionally provide a unique view or a useful filtering service (or most importantly, a dissent on the war frenzy), I'm skeptical about the value of adding one more voice to the fray when there are countless others linking and commenting on the same things. There is value, I think, in doing some more substantive writing, and maybe I'll return to give it a shot when I have the time and the inclination to do it. Others, of course, are already moving in that direction.

The sad thing here is that, while Andy sometimes linked to the same articles as other political bloggers, he rarely had the same take on them as everyone else. Attempts to talk him out of his decision have been unsuccessful. Yesterday, he posted "This site will self-destruct in 30 days . . . "

I like to think that 30 days is plenty of time to change his mind.

Inappropriate Response - "I probably be won't be doing any blogging for a while," wrote Moira Breen on April 9, and so far she has stuck to that. She also said, though, to check back in a week or two at www.moirabreen.com. So far, that URL still points to her idle blogspot domain. Perhaps Moira is just migrating to Movable Type or some such.

Dropscan - Shiloh Bucher explained to her readers in late March that she was working on a research project involving health-care policy that left little time for her site. Her last post was April 2.

The Insolvent Republic of Blogistan - "POSTING BECOMES SPORADIC: As I enter the pit of mine own education," insisted Justin Slotman on April 6. Of course, since then he has published as many new items as all of the previous sites in this list combined. (I count 39 entries, albeit many of them short, an average of more than two a day.) You can't take anything kids kids these days say seriously.

Natalie Solent - On the other hand! Ms. Solent went through her slowdown in March, jetting off to glamorous locales and, presumably, sewing. Posting just a handful of items a week. But since the second week of April, le deluge. Is this the future of several of the weblogs listed above. (Hell, it's Seargent Stryker's present.) Or does No mean No for most of them?

So then. Whatdoesitallmean? I think it means that blogging is nothing more nor less than writing, and the bloggers are subject to the same pressures, jealousies and anxieties as anyone else. (Which is to say, I agree with Sarge mostly.) There is a lot less difference between the position of the blogger and that of the old-media writer than we sometimes pretend. Indeed, consider a list of the most steadily productive folks in or near political blogdom: Virginia Postrel, Glenn Reynolds, Patrick Nielsen Hayden, Gary Farber, Matt Welch, Ken Layne, Mickey Kaus, Andrew Sullivan, Joshua Marshall, James Lileks, Ginger Stampley, Oliver Willis. Most of those folks have spent a long time in old-media. Ginger Stampley is a tech writer, so she's used to producing text steadily. Willis says "I aspire to be a writer, but I'm not one yet."

Willis is wrong. He is a writer right now. He may not be making much money on it, but he's producing a steady body of work, day in and day out.

Willis would seem to be the contrapositive to my argument, mind you, to the extent that I have one. I would say that writers discover their vocation in different ways at different times. For some of these people, post-9/11 political blogging will be the way it happens. They will be true new-media writers, owing nothing to the Old Ways. (As an exceedingly minor poet with a few dozen publications in magazines of negligible circulation, UO counts itself among the old-media migrants.) Other continuously productive bloggers will turn out, if we examine their histories, to be longtime text-producers for usenet, mailing lists or bulletin boards. The Quasipundit proprietors and others came out of Slate's Fray. They come to us substantially pre-winnowed, in other words.

As writers, bloggers are prey to the nagging questions familiar to writers: Am I famous enough? Am I saying anything others aren't saying better? Why is so-and-so more celebrated than I? Are the opportunity costs of doing this worthwhile? Does my family hate me now, and do I care? Can I live without saying this stuff?

As more answers come back No, the winnowing process will continue.

Who will drop out? There is a famous quote of Trotsky's: "You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you." Last September, many Americans discovered for the first time that war found them fascinating. Their natural reaction was to take a reciprocal interest, at least for a time. Some of them started weblogs. In the absence of fresh, varied expressions of interest by the suitor, War, these bloggers' previous uninterest will reassert itself. At that point they will either decide to use the medium for their sustainable interests, or they will shut down. (As politics is the continuation of war by other means, to flip a phrase, the preceding holds for politics generally.) There will be no shame in it either way.