Undue Burden - It's not like Eugene Volokh thinks much of me, either, but I've always considered his specialty to be showy moral handwringing on the way to siding with Power anyway. The further you get from standard Republican issues like guns and university speech codes, the more likely he is to arrive, with exquisite regret, at the conclusion that the State, particularly when helmed by George W. Bush, must have its way. Now he has spun out a lengthy imprecation against the Supreme Court's recent detainee ruling on the grounds that our enemies may use our freedoms against us. This is bog-standard Republican authoritarianism, Kaye Grogan but in well-turned prose. It is fitting that a man who, hypothetically you understand, came out as reluctantly pro-torture, has to torture so many elements of his nightmare scenario into place ("It's like World War II! Only not against governments! But the enemies have generals! And we have allies, but they can't hold their own prisoners! Just like World War II! Even though that WAS against governments! And 50,000 prisoners surrender en masse! Even though we're fighting an insurgency! They do it just to fuck with us!")
As Gene Healy has said, there's nothing like a war to separate the men from the boys ideologically. The "pro-liberty" Volokh has been a purveyor of fear for years now. Fear is not so manly, and not so good a ground in which to nourish liberty. I hope Volokh enjoys his federal judgeship. I hope we don't mind it so much.
For a more considered response see Crooked Timber. For funnier, see the Medium Lobster. Even - gasp! - Brad DeLong has gone funny.
Fat Lady Sings - This just in:
Inspired by the early handover of sovereignty in Iraq, President George W. Bush employed the element of surprise once more last night, holding the U.S. presidential election four months early.The election, about which only top Bush administration officials were notified, went exceedingly well for the president, who carried all fifty states and garnered approximately one hundred percent of the vote.
Mr. Bush's victory speech, which he had originally scheduled for eleven P.M. last night, was at the last minute rescheduled to nine P.M., once again capitalizing on the element of surprise.
In his speech, Mr. Bush admitted that he might have had a more difficult time getting reelected if the American people had actually been notified about the time and date of the voting, but added, "A win's a win, right?"
Mr. Bush's second inauguration is slated to take place on January 20, 2005, but administration officials acknowledged that it could happen "at any time."
"For all I know it has already happened," one aide said.
From the Borowitz Report.
Surprise! - Happy "A Republic if You Can Keep It" Day to our Mesopotamian wards. Mindles H. Dreck makes a plausible argument that keeping to the schedule - okay, the schedule we accelerated in November - is the smartest thing we could do, inevitable problems notwithstanding. From the dovish side, Alan Bock thinks it's a crazy idea, but it just might work.
Oh by the Way - Daniel Drezner points out that, in addition to the headline-grabbing pooh-poohing of any Iraqi role in supporting Al Qaeda, the 9/11 Commission report also finds evidence for official Saudi support of Al Qaeda wanting. Well, shucks.
There are two casualties here, though on my reading, Drezner stresses only one: Iraq War opponents who criticized the Bush administration for going easy on the Saudi Royal Family for pecuniary reasons (that's you, Michael Moore), and Iraq War enthusiasts who are convinced that Saudi Arabia needs to be regime-changed too (that's you, neo-whatever person).
Blowing Up - The actual journalism version of my old blog item about Steve Englehart's prescient 1973 suicide bomber story in Marvel Comics' Avengers series is online at the American Spectator today. And check out the cool "cover" graphic while it's still there.
The article includes quotes from Englehart and a (qualified) defense of suicide tactics, because I understand readers want controversy.
Drat the Luck - How might history have changed if the first World Trade Center bombers weren't so stupid as to try to get their deposit back on the rental truck? That instantly turned them from fearsome killers to figures of fun in the public eye, and likely some official ones too. It invited us to underestimate Al Qaeda, and we did.
Hey, Why Wouldn't That Work for Me?? - Diana Moon writes of David Brooks that
His success is an affront to all decent hardworking people everywhere. This is a guy who has no particular expertise in his field and by dint of a pleasing personality and modest writing skills and tremendous energy has leveraged his way to prominence.
Hey, I'll take that job! Oh right: pleasing personality and tremendous energy required. Shit!
Also, she offers an even-handed assessment of Farenheit 911. (Scroll down. Look for "Farenheit 411" because typos are like that.)
Wars and Rumors of . . . Whatever - On the radar: Worldnet Daily's Joseph Farah reports that Iraqi insurgents used mustard gas in an attack on Baghdad. So far, the story does not seem to have been confirmed by any less Worldnet Dailyish outlets. It is possible, though, that we will soon have evidence that Saddam's Iraq had some World War I-era weapons around. Ooh. As with the single sarin shell that detonated last month, the story, if confirmed, will divide people reliably in twain: those looking for an excuse (retroactive) to invade Iraq will hug the news like a new, rare beanie baby; those holding out for evidence of a genuine Saddamist threat to the United States will yawn. I of course am in the latter camp. If you really want to kill someone, skip the mustard gas and get a gun.
The other "big" "news" is that the INC has a captured document showing that in the mid-1990s, Saddam Hussein offered to let Osama bin Laden broadcast anti-Saudi propaganda from Iraqi soil and explored the possibility of a more extensive operational relationship than that. A US intelligence task force says the document appears to be authentic. It's an interesting bit of history, and it would be a worthwhile starting point for an investigation - if it came to your intelligence shop and you knew nothing else about the history of Iraqi-al Qaeda contacts, you would, as a responsible analyst or officer, go Hm, and start a probe. It dates from a period before bin Laden's "declaration of war" against the US in 1998, though after early attacks since attributed to him. It dates from well before President Bush's "al Qaeda mulligan," which is not often enough remembered, in his famous speech of September 21 2001:
And we will pursue nations that provide aid or safe haven to terrorism. Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists. (Applause.) From this day forward, any nation that continues to harbor or support terrorism will be regarded by the United States as a hostile regime.
The AQ mulligan was designed to let bygones be bygones with Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and other countries, conditioned on future behavior. There appears to have been a silent "except Iraq" in the teleprompter text. Cutting that would have saved us a lot of trouble.
Nevertheless, if it were the first thing you saw, it should arouse suspicion and inspire a lot of digging. It's not the first thing we've seen, though. There's been quite a lot of digging. None of it has unearthed persuasive evidence that Iraq helped Al Qaeda attack the United States, either pre-mulligan or post. Everything that turns up is some variant of "we should have lunch sometime," and all of it is old. From the perspective of today or even late 2001, it's like finding old notes in someone's grad school apartment clutter that got passed around about some high school crush. We keep hearing that so-and-so sort of likes so-and-so and is going to ask her out, but we never find the prom corsage, the tux rental slip or the used condoms.
Meanwhile, the new document, if authentic, casts a cold unflattering light on the Mylroie/Woolsey/March Hare thesis that Saddam was behind the 1993 World Trade Center attack. To the extent that that bomb was an Al Qaeda operation, the fact that, two or three years later, Iraqi intelligence and al Qaeda are still singing "Getting to Know You . . . " tends to disconfirm Iraqi cooperation in that attack.
Bonus Fitness Blog Item - Joyner surveyed reactions to C2, the new lower-sugar Coke drink the other day. I've now had some myself and, absolutely, it's good. Let me clarify: if, like me, your taste buds are not currently sensitized to high-sugar drinks (okay, high corn-juice drinks), it's good. Nice cola taste and sweet enough. Also tried Pepsi Edge, which, like C2, contains half the sweetener of the regular soda. I liked it well enough too, though I think I give the edge - oops - to the Coke product. Of course, I drank both from plastic bottles, and my rule is: Coke from bottles, Pepsi from cans.
Anyway, I enjoyed it. And yet, it's not . . . water. Since giving up sugared beverages at the end of 2002, I've really come to like drinking H2O, and H2O keeps your palate clear, among all its other benefits. I had a box of blackberries in the car with my Pepsi Edge, and they were the tartest-tasting blackberries in some time. Bad box, or screwed-up taste buds?
It's possible that I liked it because I'm not used to high-sugar beverages any more, and that the bad reports James collected are from people who are used to the sweet stuff. If they can't enjoy it, then it doesn't work as a step down for them as a regular drink. Meanwhile, if you can handle the aspartame and drink Diet Coke or Pepsi as your beverage of choice, switching to the "low-carb product represents not a substantial drop in calories and simple sugars but a substantial increase.
I'll keep it for special occasions. But I'd rather drink it than regular coke or pepsi.
Jealous of the Rhyme and the Rhyme Routine - I've really been getting back into poetry lately, reading and writing both, which is nice. Poetry and I were estranged for some years. There are various reasons, including politics - I started back in looking for Robinson Jeffers after all - but among them is the fruitful nagging that is Aaron Haspel's God of the Machine. Not that I expect Aaron himself to accrue much reward from my return - as a Wintersian, he's destined to dislike most poetry, surely including most of what I'll write, but art is like that.
Meanwhile, he's got a great new entry on grammar and prescriptivism in same. As for grammatical and usage distinctions I would like to save, they include
o hysterical and hilarious
o agitate and irritate
o the use of "me" and "I" rather than "myself" when appropriate, which is almost every frickin' time someone uses "myself"
o actually, now that I've thought of the last one, I'm way too angry to write any further on this topic!
So, back to poetry. Currently reading Jeffers, William Bronk and William Stafford. On deck, Dana Gioia's Interrogations at Noon and some William Carlos Williams. Also I need to finish the newest Brooks Haxton book. Jeffers and Bronk go together in a way: Jeffers effaces man, then Bronk effaces everything else. I suppose Stafford puts everything back in its place. Stafford and Williams are "let there be commerce between us" poets for me - when I was younger I had no use for them, largely because their injunctions about poetry pissed me off.
By the way, Poetry X has an index of last lines, which is always cool.
Mr. Language Person - At Obsidian Wings, von reminds readers of his campaign to stomp out the idiot phrase "homicide bomber," linguistic vice of Fox News, the White House and the dimmer sorts of warbloggers. While researching what will probably be my last American Spectator article this week, I learned that the substitution is even stupider and more counterproductive than von imagines. The very reason that groups like Hamas refer to suicide bombers as shahids ("martyrs") is to distract from the fact that the bombers killed themselves. Suicide is a sin to Muslims. We ought to not just insist on calling them "suicide bombers," we ought to italicise the "suicide" part - ought to chant it over and over again like Wonkette and "ass fucking". We ought to rub their noses in it.
Even rhetorically, national defense is too important to leave to hawks. They can't even get that right.
A Billion Here, A Billion There - President GW Bush , who has not vetoed a single bill in his first term so far, has increased spending faster than any president since the Richard Nixon-Gerald Ford two-step of the mid-seventies, according to a handy chart from the Independence Institute. That's total spending OR non-defense discretionary spending. Both categories' growth has outpaced growth under Democrat Jimmy Carter and heftily exceeds the spending growth rates of Democrat Bill Clinton and Republican GHW Bush.
As the Institute press release notes
In response, likely Democratic Party challenger John Kerry has maligned alleged spending cuts and called for even higher taxes and spending. The consequence is that we now have two parties competing to see which can grow government profligacy faster.
There is a solution, though: divided government.
Gaudy Night, the Continuing Series - "Genetic mutation turns tot into superboy."
Funtime's Over - One reason why there's been so little comics blogging here lately is because comics have become somewhat depressing. While I notoriously let loose a pro-superhero story meme, at no point have I denied that superhero stories can be bad, indeed, systematically bad. The blatant winding down of "NuMarvel," as talented or interestingly flawed creators put their toys back in the original packaging, has been a downer to experience. I can see it happening in practically every book I've enjoyed. In the case of Mark Waid and Mike Weiringo's Fantastic Four and Grant Morrison's New X-Men, the authors made a metafictional show of it, and those stories gained for the bittersweet resonances. Waid makes Jack Kirby the God of the Marvel Universe, but Waid, and every reader old enough to appreciate what Jack Kirby meant to Marvel, knows how the company treated him and can intuit what Waid is confessing as his recent auctorial handiwork gets literally erased. It's actually a hell of a story. Since then: whatever. Morrison's last New X-Men storyline is less obviously audacious, but by making the whole alternate future arc the subjunctive musings of the Phoenix, Morrison reminds us how the cosmology of corporate comics has deus ex machina built into it. (The machine from which the god steps when summoned runs Microsoft Excel and Oracle Financials.)
Bendis and Maleev's Daredevil counts as especially disappointing. While I disagree with his critics about the virtues of Bendis' dialogue, the recently concluded "King of Hell's Kitchen" arc can only be said to represent a failure of nerve. It's perfectly true that Bendis obfuscates just how Matt Murdock's decision to become "the new Kingpin" differed from what he had always done as a crimefighter anyway. The story is maddeningly vague on what compromises the new course entailed. Worse, it drags in psychology as a tool to tidy up the title's variance from standard. A fatal mistake since superhero stories will bear all the character you want to freight them with but cannot support psychology even a little bit. Beyond that, it's undignified and even pitiable: according to "King," everything that has happened in Daredevil since, in the real world, Bendis took it over, all the monumental decisions, the tribulations and their vanquishings, every hard choice and final resolution Matt Murdock made over the last four years of stories, is nothing but a symptom of the character's mental illness. That Bendis would put this retroactive construction on his own work dismays.
Elsewhere, Robert Morales, who may well have figured out how to write Captain America given time, sweeps off the stage the new girlfriend who was one of the title's chief lively elements, purely so the next writer won't have to deal with writing her out of the action himself. Bruce Jones' Hulk shows less "reset effect" so far. Aspects of the current Iron Man arc are enjoyable, but he's swapped strong if oversexed female supporting characters for negligible oversexed female supporting characters; and while we've all figured out by now that "the leader" of Home Base is The Leader, it would be nice if he'd come out and say this at some point.
Ironically, the bright spot on my Marvel pull list is the much-suspected Whedon-Cassaday Astonishing X-Men. This despite the awful new costumes (especially Cyclops' frogman suit). The dialogue is inconsistent, but the characters are strong and Whedon is actually pulling something of a magic act here: he plays up putting Grant Morrison's toys back in the box (look! costumes! superheroics!), but it's one of those trick boxes like magicians use. When he opens it back up, they won't be there at all. The plot thread about the doctor who claims to have found a "cure" for the mutant gene strikes me as eminently in the spirit of Morrison's New X-Men run. I'm no longer just willing to give this title a try, I'm hooked.
So, overall, a trough. Corporate comics will give you efflorescences of glory. But sooner or later every Marvel or DC Renaissance ends. It's time to pour out a 40 on the grave of NuMarvel, but there's no point in being bitter. We simply save our dollars and hope to catch the next wave.
A Fanboy's Quotes come from Neilalien:
So, are superhero readers arrested adolescents who fantasize about wielding power, or do they desire to submit to power? - It's not that the snob camp can't make up its mind between the two - it's that the snob camp will embrace any and all theories that pee in their straw man's Cheerios.
Oh, I said quotes, plural. So add
So where is your Fascist Line To Cross on that continuum? And where do you put different comic books on that continuum and in relation to where your Line is? What makes an action fascist? How do you define fascism? See what fun interesting discussions happen when you start examining superhero comic book literature seriously? Maybe capes aren't fascist, they're just well-suited for discussing fascism.
That's enough quoting. But there's plenty more great stuff in the same item.
Original Sin - I was corresponding with Diana Moon the other week about how the real problem in American politics is less The Neocons than "national greatness conservatism." It's an interesting question whether there's a one-to-one relationship between neoconservatives and national greatness adherants. Are there any neocons who would abjure the central precepts of "national greatness?" I'm pretty sure there are national greatness conservatives who don't properly qualify as neocons - Exhibit A being Vice President Dick Cheney.
Anyway, Gene Healy has dug up an apposite quote from Weekly Standard editor Fred Barnes. It dates from 1997:
It was exciting to follow and write about ... Every press conference, I watched. Desert Storm was all I thought about or talked about. My stories concentrated on President Bush's heroic role in the war. As best I recall, he wasn't in a funk, not even for a single fleeting moment.
The Republican Party has been taken over by people who, like Barnes, consider war a tonic for the national soul. For them the atrocities of September 11, 2001, were not just a calamity. They were an opportunity. They are not to be trusted with the nation's defense because they are not trying to defend it. They're trying to purge the place.